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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/the-one-with-mindy-kaling).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So, today’s episode has some explicit words. It has some F-bombs. So if you’re in the car with your kids, this is the warning.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 362 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is all the way off in Europe someplace. I’m not even sure what country he’s in right now. But luckily we have someone more than qualified to take over his spot.

**Mindy Kaling:** Craig knew that I was coming and was like, “I’m fucking out of here. I’m not doing this.” Which hurt my feelings actually. But what can you do?

**John:** Yeah, it’s fine. Mindy Kaling is a writer and sometimes director whose credits include The Office, The Mindy Project, and Champions. As an actress, she’s appeared in all those shows plus Ocean’s 8, A Wrinkle in Time, Inside Out. Plus she has two great books. She makes me feel incredibly lazy. Mindy Kaling, welcome to the show.

**Mindy:** Thank you. I think that’s why I do it, to make other people feel like they’re not doing enough.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. Well done. You’ve done it very well. It also turns out we’re neighbors. I sort of knew you lived generally in the vicinity because we talked about the same frozen yogurt place, so I knew you must be somewhere around here, but we’re close by.

**Mindy:** Yeah. We both go to the same farmer’s market I bet.

**John:** Yeah. That’s the crucial thing about Los Angeles is frozen yogurt, farmer’s market, good little walks around the neighborhood.

**Mindy:** Do you know if our farmer’s market has organic fruit or does it just sell fruit? Because I go there thinking that it’s all organic and everything there is organic, but I have no idea.

**John:** I think it’s largely organic. You’re talking about the large farmer’s market?

**Mindy:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah, well, yes. So I think a lot of it is. And sometimes there are probably peaches that have been sung to by like special people who go out into the fields and sing to their peaches. I think it’s all good.

**Mindy:** I never ask because I think it’s insulting to ask people if it’s organic. If it is organic they’ll be like, “Are you kidding me? Why else am I doing this?” But I also feel like, oh, they could just be repurposing stuff from Von’s and I have no idea. Whatever.

**John:** The history of farmer’s markets is actually fascinating because they really do make more money by selling the fruit and vegetables to you directly because they’re not selling it wholesome to some place that’s selling it to the grocery store. So that’s why they exist. And to make us feel guilty about not eating only farmer’s market food. I don’t know.

Today I don’t want to talk about farmer’s markets, I want to talk about writing. I want to talk about writing, especially half-hour, which I just don’t know anything about and you know so much about it because you’ve written a bunch of them. But I also want to get into sort of how you got started because so many of the people who listen to the show are aspiring writers and so they’re thinking about like “Well how do I go from this person who is writing this one script in my house to actually writing on a show?” And so I want to talk about that journey for you if that’s OK.

**Mindy:** Yeah, absolutely.

**John:** Cool. So looking through your backstory, you grew up in the east coast, right?

**Mindy:** Yes.

**John:** At what point did you start to think like, oh hey, I want to write? And did you start to think I want to write for screen versus writing for a book? How early did writing come into the field?

**Mindy:** I had very strict, very loving but strict parents who didn’t let me do a lot of activities. My parents both immigrated to the states in the ‘70s and were very suspicious of American culture and its effect on its children. And so I spent a lot of time alone. My mother was a doctor, so I spent a lot of time sitting alone in the phlebotomy room of her – she was an OB-GYN – in the phlebotomy room of her office, which is where they take bloods. Drawn. They draw bloods there. So basically what I would do was sit in a little desk and I could bring a book with me, or I could do nothing. But those were my choices. And this is obviously well before cell phones. It was early ‘80s.

And then every 20 or so minutes I’d have to scuttle out while they took bloods and I’d stand in the hallway, while a patient was getting her blood drawn. So, I started writing because I loved reading. I absolutely loved reading. I read so quickly. And I wasn’t reading like brainy books. I was just read The Babysitter’s Club, whatever. And I started writing because there was a typewriter in there. And I just thought it was cool. I thought the sound it made sounded cool and official and grown up. And I just started writing on it.

And then the first thing I wrote was plays because plays, writing dialogue seemed easier than writing anything else. So, I thought that was significant that the first thing I would write was just how you say and speak things. Although now it feels like it’s probably very natural for children to write dialogue rather than writing fiction or nonfiction.

**John:** You’re just typing on this typewriter and you’re writing things that you and your friends would perform? Or were they just kind of for you?

**Mindy:** Oh, I had no friends. So it was just me. It was just me and I would show it to my mom and dad. So I was really raised with this idea of like how do I please mom and dad, how do I please mom and dad. So I would write things that I thought they would think was funny. So the first thing I remember writing, and I think my dad still has this somewhere, was a comedy play about a haunted house. And I remember when people ask, because for whatever reason I’ve done so many interviews, that people always ask “What was your first joke that you wrote?” And I think the first joke I wrote was in this play where a mummy said – a mummy who was living in the haunted house – a witch, a mummy, and a vampire lived in the haunted house. And the mummy turned to the vampire and was like, “I don’t know what the taxes are for this haunted house.”

I don’t even think I really understood what taxes were, but it seemed like a grown up term, so that was probably the first joke I wrote.

**John:** But you had a sense of the structure of a joke. It was a comment on a thing that these two people were talking about. Something that doesn’t seem related to a haunted house. Like taxes and haunted houses are a weird thing to join together, so you already had that sense of a joke.

**Mindy:** One thing doesn’t belong. And I see adults griping about things that they seem to think is funny, you know, and relatable, or just that my parents would gripe about that. So that was the first thing.

And I just, more than writing though, I just read. I think that you’ll find that most writers now, like I have a six-month-old baby so I don’t read as much now, but almost everyone I know who is a screenwriter or TV writer read so much as a child. And it wasn’t like classy books. They’d read through all the Hardy Boys, all the Babysitter’s Club, pamphlets, magazines. Anything that would come – because I wasn’t really allowed to do anything else and I wasn’t good at sports, so.

**John:** I was an obsessive reader, too. So if I was in the bathroom I would have to have something to read. So I would read the back of shampoo bottles. Or every time we were in the car I was always reading. And so when I finally got my driver’s license I had no idea where anything was because I had never really looked out the windows of the car. I was just reading a book, again and again.

**Mindy:** I actually get worried because I think that the desire to read would be so replaced so easily with looking at a phone, so with my daughter I have to get her – and I’m so out of it that I don’t even know, do kids read books anymore or do they just read on their iPads? I have no idea?

**John:** Yeah, so they do still read books. Kids, there was this whole movement towards Kindles and stuff like that. But my daughter still prefers physical books. She’s 13. So they still will read, but it’s really true that they are drawn to their phone. And that boredom time where you would have picked up a book, they’ll definitely pick up their phone. And so that’s the challenge you’re going to face is how to convince them it’s worth the extra effort to grab the book rather than grabbing their phone.

**Mindy:** Oh no.

**John:** But the kinds of jokes you’re talking about, you must have been watching TV. You must have been watching some movies to get a sense of people talking and sort of that rhythm. Or was it all just observing?

**Mindy:** Yeah. I was a late bloomer on TV. You know, a lot of comedy guys — I’ll read like Paul Feig or Judd Apatow, what they did when they were children. Their parents let them watch TV. And I wasn’t allowed to watch TV until I think it was probably junior high when I had kind of established that I wasn’t a kid that was going to do drugs or be a bad kid. We never had cable. All through high school we never had cable. So if I wanted to watch cable I would have to go to someone else’s house.

But what became a big tradition in my house was 7th and 8th grade my parents really liked Seinfeld. So I could watch Seinfeld on Thursday nights. I don’t even know, Seinfeld, Cheers, I don’t even know if I was really allowed to watch Friends. Friends was really something that I kind of caught up on when I was in my 20s. So that’s it. And that was a big deal. And my parents really loved comedy and they saw like, “OK, this is sort of – this is really funny. We love George. This isn’t going to be something that is going to corrupt our kids or is going to make us feel uncomfortable when we’re watching it.”

And then I think that they also just saw that I really loved it. So Must See TV was massive for me. Thursday nights is when I could watch TV. It also felt, I think, weird or perverted to my parents that I would come home on a Monday evening and just like turn on TV. Like I think they thought it’s a work day.

**John:** Absolutely. You have to work to do.

**Mindy:** You have work to do and homework to do. And it’s good because I have this very addictive personality that I would have been that kid. Like I never watched – I think the symbol for the thing that they were the most scared of was Married with Children. They felt like if you watched Married with Children, you were like really braindead. You were going down a bad path. And to a lesser degree The Simpsons.

**John:** Wow.

**Mindy:** Like I had to make my parents sit down and watch The Simpsons and be like, “No, this is funny and actually smart and satirical.” But, yeah, Married with Children was just like – in fact, the entire Fox Network I think was something that my parents were suspicious of. Because it had that kind of irreverent, Garbage Pail Kid, like we don’t care what you think thing. So I was really sheltered from a lot of that stuff growing up.

**John:** I would have guessed that the Mary Tyler Moore Show or those would be the templates, because I look at some of the work you’ve done and they’re workplace comedies, they are a woman trying to find her place in this world. I would have guessed that you are person who was watching all the reruns of those growing up.

**Mindy:** No, I love Mary Tyler Moore. My parents did let me watch Nick at Nite. So I would watch Rhoda, Mary Tyler Moore. If it was black and white they were like, “OK, there’s nothing–“

**John:** Very classy.

**Mindy:** “Very classy. Nothing.” And a lot of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. So I did get to watch. But again we didn’t have Nick at Nite because it was on cable so it would be like once a week we’d go to my aunt’s house to have dinner and they had cable so we would watch. I would watch all of Nick at Nite. But it wasn’t really until later that Mary Tyler Moore I really got into it. But it’s such an amazing show.

**John:** Now, when did you decide to study writing and make that be your primary focus? Was that your undergrad degree?

**Mindy:** Yes. I majored in playwriting and the classics. So I did Latin. Equally unhelpful majors. No chances. Which actually was great because I feel that a lot of women, particularly young Indian women, ask like how did you persuade your parents to let you do writing and acting. And the truth is I didn’t have, while they were very strict and like worried about me having bad influences as a kid, they were very open to me being a writer and an actor as long as I was achieving some success at it. You know, but I’m sorry, your question was did I have a degree in writing.

Yeah, but I’ll tell you this. I went to Dartmouth and I took playwriting, but I felt that I pretty much learned nothing from playwriting in college. I think the classes I took in terms of writing didn’t help me. It’s not that the classes were bad. It’s just that wasn’t the experiences that helped me. It was writing short plays for my friends to perform, because that’s when I got to see, “OK, what do actors like to say. How do actors do well?” Because otherwise when you’re just taking a class you have no idea. You can write a one-act play, try to write a full-length play. And we had great professors. But none of that was really helpful. And frankly none of that was really fun.

It was all my extracurriculars in college that kind of taught me what I wanted to do. Because I took improv and I would do these short one-act plays that I’d put up at our black box theater at Dartmouth. And that’s what was like, “OK, well this is really what I want to do.”

**John:** So doing these extracurricular things, did you find a tribe of really great, smart, fun people you could sort of write for? How did you get into that stuff? Because what you’re describing seems very consistent with a lot of people. Whatever the degree they got, great, but it was everything else that was not part of the college curriculum that was really what they learned during those years.

**Mindy:** Yeah. Well, you know, it really helped me because I really wanted to make friends and I was nervous about making friends. So what helped was I was like, “OK, I’m this loser who came to college. I have no friends. I really like dynamic, funny, actor type personalities,” because I didn’t know what a comedy writer was or anything back then.

And so I met them through doing improv and because I was like funny enough to get on the improv team, though not like the funniest person on the team by any measure, those were the people that I started hanging out with. And then I was like, “Oh, it would be fun to write for them.”

And what I found was often I would write myself parts in things simply because there was just, at least in Dartmouth in the early 2000s there was not a ton of young women that were like, “Oh, I want to really put myself out there as a comedian.” So I kind of did it because I was like, oh, well there’s female roles. And I loved the attention but I was more scared of it.

**John:** Now, coming out of college what was your plan and what were the actual first kind of months and years like coming out of college? What were the next steps you did?

**Mindy:** Yeah. That was a really exciting period, but if I look back in my life and think about the time when I felt the most uneasy and depressed, even though I’m not a depressed person, but the time that I felt, oh, what’s going to happen. Post-college was really fucking hard. And I graduated when I was 21 and I started working on The Office at 24, so we’re talking three years. But it’s that time when a single week feels like it lasts a year. When you’re so ambitious and no one knows who you are and no one is giving you an outlet. And it was really hard because at the time, by the time I ended my time at Dartmouth I was like a big – I was a big star in the drama/comedy/performing world. Like it was great that I went there because that would not have been the case if I had gone to an actual artsy school, like Yale or NYU or something. I would never have continued on to be a writer.

But because nobody really wanted to do what I wanted to do there. This is like well past – Phil and Chris had already graduated. I didn’t overlap with them at all. I felt like such a big shot on that campus. And then went to New York and it was just that thing that I didn’t think would happen to me which was that nobody cared. I was a babysitter. I couldn’t get – I wanted to just go straight to SNL. But we didn’t have like a Harvard Lampoon. We had a comedy newspaper that I used to write for, but it didn’t have that kind of pre-professional edge to it.

**John:** And there wasn’t like an alumni network that could sort of get you in places in New York?

**Mindy:** No.

**John:** None of that?

**Mindy:** No. It was Dr. Seuss was the only other person. Because truly, no, because Shonda wasn’t Shonda yet. Phil and Chris hadn’t done stuff yet. So there wasn’t that network out there.

**John:** Phil and Chris are Lord and Miller?

**Mindy:** Yes. Yes. And Shonda is Shonda Rhimes.

**John:** Shonda lives in the neighborhood, too.

**Mindy:** Yeah, she does. I keep thinking I know what her house is and I slow down in front of it, not realizing how creepy that must be. Because someone at Shonda’s level I think probably has security.

**John:** Yes.

**Mindy:** And so they’re probably photographing me and showing her photos and she’s like, “Ugh, Mindy Kaling.”

**John:** Again.

**Mindy:** “Sitting in front of my house again.”

**John:** She follows you to Dartmouth. She follows you to Los Angeles. It’s terrible.

**Mindy:** I know. What a creep that girl is, she must be saying. And I email her a lot, too, about – not weirdly about writing stuff, because the drama world and comedy world are so different, but about baby things. She’s very helpful.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Mindy:** Sorry, so I was telling my sad tale of me being in NYC without a job.

**John:** It’s a very classic story of like you move from college to NYC. You’re sort of in your ramen days. You’re just trying to–

**Mindy:** Yeah. 9/11 happened a month after we moved there. You can’t go in the subway.

**John:** Good timing.

**Mindy:** Yeah. And so my parents were really antsy about me being there, too. I was babysitting. And that was the time where, when people ask why I’m successful I think it comes from this one feeling I remember happening there was like my panic is very useful to me. And my panic is something that is so deeply uncomfortable – keeping me up at night, can’t sleep – that until I can do something with the panic like I really can’t function.

So my panic when I was 21 when I didn’t immediately go write on SNL, I didn’t even get a job as a page at NBC. Like I was rejected from that even. My friend and I who was kind of my – she’s more of an actress, but my friend Brenda from college, we would – she was a substitute teacher and I was a babysitter. So we had opposite hours. But there was always one or two hours in the middle of the day that we overlapped. And during that time we would always hang out and either watch TV or go for a walk in Prospect Park. And so we started just kind of improvising characters and being like what do we really want to write and what’s fun to play?

And so we had always had a kind of theatrical friendship where we would be doing bits with each other and we kind of started improvising in these really absurd improvising world where she was Matt Damon and I was Ben Affleck. And we found that we could walk around Prospect Park for like three miles and improvise in character.

And as we were doing it it wasn’t even a thing where I’d be like, “OK, well what if we did this?” because we were in character the whole time and these whole backstories that we just invented for these two guys came up. And this is back in 2001. So, you know, they were like – I mean, they’re extremely famous now. But this was like a different – I don’t know if you remember. It was a different kind of fame. Because there’s like the fame of youth and who they were dating really mattered and all that. And you were just bludgeoned with it in magazines.

**John:** And Premiere Magazine, sort of like people to watch, on the rise, that kind of–

**Mindy:** Yeah. It was a couple of years after they had won I think an Oscar for Good Will Hunting. So they were both like the biggest young A-list celebrities. And I think they’re both like about ten years older than us, or seven or eight years older than us. So they loomed really large for us, in pop culture anyway. So we just started doing that. And we didn’t know what we would do with it. It just amused us.

And then we were like well what if we just like wrote down some of the stuff they were doing and we wrote this play called Matt and Ben that we ended up performing at the Fringe Festival. And then it won the Fringe Festival which was really where we – where I at least, because Brenda stayed in New York to do acting and I wanted to write. So I moved to LA off of the success of that.

**John:** So let’s connect some dots here. To get into the Fringe, so you write this play and then do you submit the play in its written form into the Fringe Festival or how do you get into the Fringe Festival?

**Mindy:** Yeah, OK, so this is the nitty gritty stuff that I feel like I always gloss over because it feels so logistical, but yes, I know that this is interesting for young people who are trying to make it. So, at that point – this is like not pre-Internet, but like barely Internet, you couldn’t submit even something online. You would go to the Fringe Festival. That was the big, in our big group of friends of theater – off-off-Broadway theater people. They’re like, well, the one thing where you can be seen if you’re not cast is the International Fringe Festival, which wasn’t even that old. It was barely a thing. It’s definitely not like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

But it was the only way that you could just kind of be seen by anybody. And you knew that if you could make it there’s like 500 things that go up in the Fringe Festival. They have a huge acceptance rate, or at least it’s like 50%. And if you can make it to the top 50 of the 500 then people will kind of review it in Time Out New York and everything like that.

And I was like, OK, I’ve beat these odds before. I got into Dartmouth. I was like a big star at Dartmouth. Like maybe we could do this together.

So we downloaded the application. We wrote up what we thought the play would be. We sent in $50 which was a lot of money. And you just waited. And we didn’t get an email saying that you were accepted. You get like a letter. I’m really dating myself now. I sound like I’m a thousand years old.

And they accepted it. But it wasn’t even this delicious thing of, “Oh, we’ve been accepted,” because at that time they took so many people. And then it’s a kind of cool thing the Fringe Festival. I don’t know if they do it now where there’s all these tiny little venues in Downtown New York that you wouldn’t even know about that were open for these – the Fringe Festival is like two or three weeks. So we did our play in the Fringe Festival at a – it was East Broadway was the subway stop you’d have to get off. It was like a Chinese cultural center’s auditorium is where we did our play.

And so you’d walk into the lobby and there’s all this Chinese cultural posters and things, actually pretty interesting. Great festivals every year. And then they had this beautiful auditorium that was for, I don’t know, telling senior citizens where your Chinese resources were in the neighborhood. So they were like, yeah sure, we’ll do that. And so really the Fringe Festival is all based on all these tiny little auditoriums agreeing to have these people.

So, long story short, we did I think it was only three nights. The Fringe Festival is just three nights. And what we did was we went out of pocket. We borrowed money from – I think we figured out that, somehow the number was like $2,500 that if we could borrow $2,500 to promote the show ourselves then we would make that back in ticket sales and we could pay back everyone. So we made up little postcards with Matt and Ben, with like a little picture of them with their eyes covered and with all the dates of our three shows on them. And then we just would go around New York City. I would go to Barnes and Nobles and I would stick them in all the different cool magazines.

**John:** Amazing.

**Mindy:** That I thought people would buy. Which is completely illegal. So I would just go and look like I was reading through a magazine and stick one in there. So, I’d hit like six Barnes and Nobles and stick the little flyer thing in all of those. And then all through Park Slope, and the East Village, and the West Village we would just put up signs for Matt and Ben. And I think because of the subject material, which we didn’t know at the time was – because of the subject material people were like even more interested in seeing it.

And so we did three performances. And then we were like voted. We didn’t even know there was like a thing at the end where they like Sundance or whatever, they say like, “Oh, here’s the awards,” because we didn’t know. How could you possibly see everything?

But we won Best Production at that festival.

**John:** And the production is just the two of you, correct?

**Mindy:** It’s just the two of us. There’s like a sofa. Actually, it’s very much like a sitcom set. It’s just a sofa and just a living room. I think we kind of subconsciously just thought like, “OK, this should just look like a sitcom.” But it was very easy to move that play around. And we just needed the two of us. And we couldn’t have paid any other actors to do it which is why I acted in it.

And that was very lucky, because if I hadn’t done that I don’t think I would have been a performer on The Office. So yeah.

**John:** Now at this point are you Mindy Kaling or are you using your longer name? Where were you at in your transition?

**Mindy:** I think, because I was so – even though I didn’t have an agent or anything, I had done standup before that and I remember this so distinctly that I had spent weeks and weeks trying to get in this one standup show that was at this little hotel in like the East 20s. And weeks and weeks. And I had like this – I worked so hard to do a tight ten. And you had to ask a friend who had already performed in it, who was barely a friend, if they could ask someone to do it. And this wasn’t the time when anyone was like, yeah, let’s try to make room for people who look different. It’s like, hey, it’s fine if it’s all white men and one guy’s girlfriend. That’s fine. We can do a whole night.

And I finally did it and I remember the emcee butchered my last name when he was introducing me and made a joke about it. And I don’t even–

**John:** How do you pronounce your last name?

**Mindy:** Chokalingam. And so he was so – I don’t even think he meant to – I don’t think he’s like a racist guy, but because he messed it up he did like a little Indian accent to cover for it. And then when I was there I was so shaken, because I didn’t know – I wasn’t like good at standup so I didn’t know how to roll with it and deal with a white standup comedian who doesn’t know who to pronounce a long Indian name that I think the set went terribly. I had invited all my friends to come see it. And I remember on the subway going home – one of my best friends is half Asian – and I was sitting there and I was like I have to not have that feeling anymore where people feel – not even people who are racist – that they feel uneasy about saying my name because they don’t know how to pronounce. I was like, you know what, I know why Bob Dylan did it. I know why Woody Allen did it. Like if they did it and their names are even more easy to pronounce Jewish names, I got to just do this.

And it was weird because I was like I wonder what my parents are going to think if I suggest this. And it was interesting because my mom had taken my dad’s name. But she was a doctor. And she was like, you know what, we totally get this. If I look back at my career it might have been easier. And I asked my dad because it’s his last name. And he’s like, “Oh my god, do it.”

So, they were the only real obstacles. I was thinking of like, OK, well how is this going to make them feel. But I was so happy I did it.

**John:** Yeah. So I changed my last name, too.

**Mindy:** Did you really?

**John:** Yeah. My last name was German. It was Meise. It’s pronounced Mize-y. But no one ever could pronounce that name. So you’d see this hesitation and they’d go Meyes? Mise? And so the first ten seconds of meeting anybody was just correcting how they mispronounced–

**Mindy:** Correcting them.

**John:** How they mispronounced my name. And it’s a terrible way to start any new conversation. And so between graduating from school in Iowa and moving out to Los Angeles I took my dad’s middle name, which is August, as my last name and it just–

**Mindy:** That’s so funny. I didn’t know that.

**John:** Yeah. It makes life so much easier.

**Mindy:** Isn’t it? So it’s just a making life easier thing. Isn’t it so interesting?

**John:** But I mean I do also worry that this temptation to make things simpler for everybody also just makes things kind of whiter and smoother. I do worry that it takes some of the–

**Mindy:** No, for sure.

**John:** The texture out of the world.

**Mindy:** No, it’s true. And then also it’s just like are the only people who can be successful just have these incredibly easy to pronounce names? You know, it’s funny, I once saw this tweet that Kumail Nanjiani tweeted which is like “People have trouble saying my name. It’s just what it looks like.” And if I had a name that was just what it looked like, that’s how you pronounce it, I would have no issue. But I think you’re right.

But, you know, when you’re young you don’t think about the sort of sociopolitical ramifications of what you’re doing. You’re just like I got to make it. This is another obstacle getting in my way.

**John:** I think changing my name, you know, maybe is 5% of sort of making me more successful. But just that same thing where people don’t stumble across your name just helps.

**Mindy:** Or they’re inwardly wincing, you know, about trying to recommend me to something or bring me up in conversation, even when you’re not–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Mindy:** Like half of my life I’m like I love Chimamanda Ngozi. I don’t even know if I’m pronouncing her name right. Because she’s such an amazing writer. But half the time I want to reference her I’m like, ah, I’m going to mess up her name and then I’m going to seem like I’m–

**John:** Yeah, or you say the poet who wrote the Beyoncé stuff. That’s the same person you’re talking about. So you might not directly use her name, but refer to her as the thing, or the other person’s name you can pronounce.

**Mindy:** Yes.

**John:** And that’s a challenge.

**Mindy:** I know. Which is a different way of making yourself be invisible. I don’t have an opinion about recommending it to other people or not. But you made your decision when you were very young. I did it when I was 21.

**John:** I was 21, too.

**Mindy:** Yeah. And it’s like to the point where like it’s funny, you make those kinds of decisions when you’re just so ambitious and just so didn’t want there to be an obstacle. Because I’m like there’s already a million obstacles in my way. Why would I not move that? I don’t know if I would make that decision if I was older, but I did it.

**John:** I do have friends who have considered what last name to use and end up using their Latino last name deliberately so that they are on lists for staffing, so people can actually see that they are a Latino writer. Because if they have a generic white-sounding name they may not know that you’re a Latino writer. It’s a weird time.

**Mindy:** Yeah.

**John:** So, you have written Matt and Ben. It’s gone great. And did you also do it in Los Angeles? How did more people discover it?

**Mindy:** Yeah, so then what happened with the play was it had enough people – off the success of the Fringe then like little producers in New York who they can do Off-Broadway plays, they put up money for that, put it up at PS122.

**John:** Great.

**Mindy:** Which is a great venue in Downtown New York. And we got more and more people. And that was when – when it was PS122 that’s when like Steve Martin came to see it and Nicole Kidman came to see it. We got our photos taken with them afterwards. And it became like a hot ticket. And we would do it six or seven times a week. And then from that they’re like, you know what, this would probably do well in LA.

And so I was so excited to go to LA because I knew that my future as a comedy writer – at that point I knew I wanted to write for TV. I felt that it was in Los Angeles, not in New York. And so I was really excited to go out there. And we went out there – this is how – I’m actually amazed at myself sometimes, because I already had an Arrested Development spec I had written.

**John:** Amazing. So you watched the show and you just guessed on sort of what a script of that would look like? Or had you read a script?

**Mindy:** So I had gone to the 67th Street Upper West Side Barnes and Noble and they have books on how to break into TV writing. So I bought like two books and they all said you need a spec script of a show. And then because this is like pre scripts being available online, I actually went in SoHo there’s this guy who sells TV scripts, printed out copies of TV scripts, on like a foldout table on Broome Street.

**John:** I’ve seen that guy. So you actually–

**Mindy:** Yeah. It was like Broome and Spring. He would set up his little – in a full circle moment I now like own an apartment in SoHo and I still see that same guy there selling his sitcoms and he has an episode of The Office that I wrote.

**John:** Amazing.

**Mindy:** I know. And I was like should I tell this guy? He’ll be like, “Fuck off, it’s not interesting to me. Who cares?” But I was like my full circle moment! You’re part of it, sir.

Yeah, so I got a copy of Arrested Development. And so I literally I was just like I don’t know about act breaks. I don’t know how long the script should be. I have a sense of it just from watching it on DVDs. So while we were doing Matt and Ben at night in New York, because I knew we were going to go to LA at that point. We had like two months before we were going to go. So I was like, OK, I have a couple of ideas for this. So I got an Arrested Development script ready to go.

So, I had that when we went to LA.

**John:** None of what you described so far sounds like luck. All of it sort of sounds like hard work.

**Mindy:** Thank you. You know, I’ve often – like you know, I think that hard work is two different things. Because like hard work is like, in America at least, it’s like good to be hard-working. But often it’s cool, particularly from some of my WASP-ier friends who maybe worked on the Lampoon where like you’re not supposed to show how ambitious you are. It’s just there’s such a bad look. And I’m like, well, if that’s true then I’m like living a perpetual bad look because I am like nothing without my panic fear, hard work like cycle that I go through.

But, yeah, thank you. I don’t think I had any luck either.

**John:** No.

**Mindy:** I mean, I definitely had supportive parents. And I went to a great school. So it’s not that – I had luck being born into a nice family who had enough money to send me to an Ivy League school for sure. But–

**John:** But to describe back a few things, you were talking about the panic and rather than just dwelling on the panic you actually started talking through stuff with a friend. You walked around. You recognized that this thing that you’re actually describing could actually be a good thing. You did the work to actually write that thing. And then the work to actually figure out a way that people could see this thing. And see that it was good. And while you’re having success, you didn’t take that, OK I’m going to stop here. You’re like I’m going to work extra hard to write the thing that will get me to the next place.

And so many people I think along the way they get to this thing and they’re like, “OK, when will lightning strike more? When are people going to notice me more?” And they’re not doing the thing to actually get them to the next place.

**Mindy:** Well it’s exhausting, right? Because that’s how you – just to keep going, it’s like you can never just sort of sit and be content for too long. It’s like constantly churning, especially as a writer, and particularly if you’re creating your own work it’s just a constant thing. But luckily I have enough panic for many lifetimes. So I think I’ll be OK.

**John:** So you come out to Los Angeles and you’re doing the play and you’re also meeting folks?

**Mindy:** So I’m doing the play. The play is going like spectacularly badly.

**John:** Was it at the Hudson? Where were you doing it?

**Mindy:** It was going so badly. It was at the Acme Theater on La Brea, which I think is still there. It’s going so spectacularly badly. Horrible. It’s like this is so not a theater town.

**John:** I remember reading a review of it in Variety which I think was a good review.

**Mindy:** Oh really?

**John:** But I remember actually seeing the physical, because I had the printed Variety at that point, and I remember seeing–

**Mindy:** Oh really?

**John:** The first time seeing a review of it.

**Mindy:** Oh my god. It was horrible. It was horrible, horrible, horrible. And there’s just something, in New York, because I like the play and I think it’s a funny play, and I think the performances are great. Not my performance. My friend. I just thought it was a good play. It was worthy of – I believed in it. Anyway.

And I think that in New York there’s just much more of a feeling of these little rinky-dink plays with something special in them. They have little venues. It’s like you can go on a date. Or you could do whatever. And it felt like here if you brought someone to go see a play in LA you were like “This is the worst date of my life. What are you, poor? Why can’t you take me to something nice?”

And so it just had a very different feeling about it here. So it went terribly and I, again, I was really panicked about that. But because of my spec script our agent, who started representing us when we went Off-Broadway, for writing was – I was taking meetings to staff on things. And actually that was going really badly, too.

**John:** And why badly? Because they would have already read you before you’d gone in. So, did you–?

**Mindy:** I can’t even, I just want to say, I can’t emphasize how much there was not this feeling of wouldn’t it be great to have writers in a writer’s room that don’t look like everybody else. It truly was like that wasn’t a thing at all back then. And I felt that it was – I had done this play. I had an Arrested Development spec. I really wanted to get into – I thought Will and Grace is such a great show. Couldn’t get a meeting on Will and Grace. Couldn’t get a meeting on – at that time it was Father of the Pride, was that animated show that was going to be after the Olympics. Couldn’t get into that room.

Couldn’t get a meeting with any of those people. But now if I think about it like an Indian-American girl who had like written a play that won the Fringe Festival who would come out to LA who had written a spec, like I’d be like of course I would take a meeting with that person. But things have just changed now, or maybe because I am Indian, where every showrunner would be like well of course you’d meet that person. It seems like what a great person to put on your show. But it wasn’t that.

Or maybe my material just wasn’t good enough. But the doors were just completely slammed shut except for Greg Daniels who had seen my play with his wife Susanne and they–

**John:** Susanne Daniels at that point was running the WB Network.

**Mindy:** WB. Yeah. Or, you know, I think she just left the WB and was now an independent producer. But so Greg and she had seen the show and Greg wanted to – Greg and I met for The Office, which wasn’t a thing yet, and when I had my meeting with him I hadn’t even seen the original Office. I hadn’t even heard of it.

And so met with me. We had a really long meeting, which I thought went terribly. And then after he hired me as a staff writer for six episodes first season. NBC so did not believe in this show at that time. But I didn’t – it was not a job that anyone who wanted to be a comedy writer would have signed up for. Because who would sign for six episodes when you could do a 22-episode fifth season of an existing show?

**John:** So a general rule, I think long meetings are good. Has that been your experience since that time? Are most long meetings good meetings?

**Mindy:** Yeah, you know, at the time I had no idea. It was maybe my second or third meeting that I’d had. Yeah, I think long meetings are good. You’re totally right. Long meetings are good.

Greg, if you have ever met him, is someone who is completely comfortable with like long pauses and silences. He’s a very reflective person who can be thinking about something and you’re just sitting there nervous. It wasn’t like a chatty fun, “Oh I know that person, too,” like one of those kinds of meetings. He is just a – he will not just be like chattering away if he doesn’t think it’s worth saying, whereas I’m the opposite. I’m as my mom calls me a talkie-talkie, say-nothing.

So I’m like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he was not. But I remember leaving thinking like oh my god if I could work for that guy. He’s so fucking smart. And I was at the King of the Hill offices because he was I think working on The Office while he was doing King of the Hill. So, it was very intimidating.

**John:** And when you were hired on did you know that you were going to be a performer as well? Or were you just hired on to write?

**Mindy:** I didn’t – I just thought I was going to be a writer. I didn’t know that there was a clause in there which is as a performer there was a pre-negotiated thing. And I think my agent so thought that was not a possibility that we didn’t even talk about it.

And it didn’t occur to me that being on a sitcom that was only picked up for six episodes was something to worry about. Or that there was something better than that. I think that looking back it was of all my professional success being hired on The Office was probably the most exhilarating.

**John:** Yeah. Because suddenly you really are being paid to do the thing that you want to be doing.

**Mindy:** Really getting paid.

**John:** Drew Goddard was on the show and we were talking about some of those early jobs, some of the best early jobs are sort of the underdog jobs or sort of the long shots, or shows that are kind of in trouble, or no one is really paying attention, because then as the new person in you sort of can just do new stuff. And The Office was really, even though it was based on an existing format, was really breaking sort of new weird spaces.

**Mindy:** That’s such a good point. That’s such a good point. I think that Drew was correct. Drew Goddard is smart for a reason. He’s successful for a reason.

**John:** He’s a very smart person.

**Mindy:** Yeah.

**John:** Because he was talking about sort of early on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and when things were just in chaos that’s a really great time to come onboard because they’re open to sort of new ideas. And you’re there while they’re figuring stuff out.

**Mindy:** Did you see the documentary about the Dana Carvey show?

**John:** No. I haven’t.

**Mindy:** OK. So it’s a great, great documentary about how could this go wrong, because the writing staff I’m sure you know was like Colbert, Carell, Charlie Kaufman, Robert Carlock. It was just like, Dana. So it has huge – and of course Dana Carvey was the star at the height of his powers. And it had this hugely talented staff, of all white men, but it did terribly and it got canceled I think in its first season or only lasted one season.

And it was so fascinating because here’s like how did that not go well? And I think maybe because there was so much scrutiny on it. Where everyone was like we can’t wait to see – they’re rubbing their hands together – we can’t wait to see what Dana Carvey does. And it was, probably because there was just so much scrutiny.

The Office was the opposite of that, which was I think that – I don’t want to speak out of turn here, because Greg knows better than me. I was like a staff writer so I truly didn’t know what was going on that much. But my sense of it was that The Office was like, “OK, six episodes, like let’s just let this run its course.” And frankly our first season we did terribly. I still love those first season episodes. I think they’re so funny, but I also think I was particularly attached to them because it was my first experience writing in TV. It was just completely intoxicating and it was such a small room. And I was like, “Oh, Mike Schur is so cool and mean. And B.J. Novak is so cool and mean. And everyone is so cool and mean. I hope they become my friends.” And it felt like we were just doing like such – by the way, now they’re going to be like, “Why’d you say I was cool and mean on the podcast?”

I was going to say they’re both very nice, which is also not true, but they’re both perfectly nice and have since become my good friends. But I just remember being like I’d never been around this level of concentrated comedy, of people who just like knew what they were doing. And I was just trying to keep up.

**John:** So talk to me about know what you’re doing, because I’ve never written half-hour and I don’t really have a good sense of what the process is like in the room and I’m sure it’s different for certain shows than other shows. But as you guys are breaking an episode, so you have a general sense of the ideas of the episode or the big things that are happening. How many days are you there figuring out, OK, this is the episode before someone goes off and writes it? The Office or your later shows.

**Mindy:** The Office or later shows. Well, I just took the way that we had done things at The Office and brought that onto The Mindy Project. And I did it at Champions. And then now at Four Weddings and a Funeral. We just do things the same way.

And the way that we did it – the way that Greg did it – was that we would kind of blue sky or talk about the entire series for several weeks, maybe two weeks. And sort of like we would take a couple days and talk about each character and what made them funny. What was their wound? How would they react in different situations? Their backstory. And that’s when, those first couple weeks is when you figure out like, OK, Dwight Schrute has a beet farm. That kind of thing. Michael Scott, you know, he talks about his mother and his step-father but we never really know about his dad. I don’t know how far we got with it.

But we just – and then we just went through all the main characters on the show and did that.

**John:** And at this point had a pilot script been written? Or this was before the pilot script was written? Because it was kind of a special case on The Office right?

**Mindy:** Yeah, well no, Greg adapted the pilot. They had already shot the pilot, when I came onboard. So then when they’re hiring a staff that’s when like Mike, me, Paul Lieberstein, that we came onboard. And B.J. was in the pilot, but he was in the writer’s room as well.

So we had this small room. And so then after the second week of talking kind of blue sky about the characters then it was like, OK, we have these six episodes, let’s like go – one of them is already written, so we have five episodes. What would be great or funny things? And that was all like well above my pay grade. That was kind of Greg deciding what he wanted to do. And then us pitching jokes on how that could be funny, or twists and turns in the story.

**John:** So what’s happening in the room, are you pitching jokes like actual dialogue jokes? Or are you pitching conflicts or little bits of like this scene would work like this? How much to dialogue are you getting into in the room?

**Mindy:** In the room?

**John:** Before someone goes off and writes the script?

**Mindy:** I think at The Office the first season it would be, like if Greg or Paul Lieberstein who were like the co-EPs and EPs on the show, if they had like a turn of phrase or a piece of dialogue that they thought Michael could say, or Dwight would say, then that would go into the script. I mean, I don’t really know how many even usable bits of dialogue or jokes I even contributed. But not that much. In later shows, like what we did at The Mindy Project, which has a completely different rhythm. Because what happened at Mindy was – it was a couple Office writers, but not that many because they were all still working on The Office. Because my first season of Mindy was the last season of The Office. So those guys were still employed.

Actually, I don’t know if I had any Office writers my first season. I don’t think I did. I had a couple 30 Rock writers. A couple Simpsons writers. And then the other writers – I’m sorry, one Simpsons writer, and then everyone else was from late night TV, from like Jimmy Fallon and Colbert.

So, the style of that show was very different from The Office for a lot of reasons. It wasn’t a mockumentary. But the joke rhythm became a little bit more – The Office has tons of jokes, but it was more of a hybrid. It had a real like more 30 Rock/Simpsons joke dense type of show. And that became a show where there was a lot of dialogue in the outline, because I was in the room, and I was the lead. So it felt like, OK, if I said something and it made people laugh, or I liked it, it would just stay in the final script.

**John:** So, Rachel Bloom, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she has a similar situation like you have on Mindy Project where she’s in the room for breaking the stories and sort of figuring stuff out, but then she’s ultimately the star of the show and has to go off and be the star of the show. Something like Mindy Project, how did you split your time between “I am the showrunner” and “I’m also the star of the show?” How were you switching back and forth between those roles?

**Mindy:** It was incredibly time-consumptive, particularly when we were at Fox. It was just a real seven day a week job. So I would go to work, my call time would be like 5 or 5:30. We’d do that first season thing where on a show you do like 13 hour days.

**John:** And why the first season? What’s different?

**Mindy:** Because on the first season scripts are longer because you’re not sure what’s going to work and what’s not going to work. So you need to just shoot longer things. And you don’t know yet. The characters, you don’t know who they are yet. So things are a little bit overwritten. And by the end of Mindy we were doing I think 11 hour days, which was great. But at the beginning it was like 13 or 14 hour days. And then I would come and then once if there was a lighting setup at Universal our writer’s room was really just like across the way, so really close. There’s a lighting setup for 45 minutes, I would go to the writer’s room and check in, see what they were working on. And then I would go back over and just do that.

And then when I wrapped at night, 6 or 7, I would edit to about 10, then go home.

**John:** Brutal.

**Mindy:** So it was tough. And then on the weekends I would just go over my lines for the next week, but then also on Saturday probably go into post. So the thing that gets really kind of held back is post. Because they can’t cut an episode without me. The director will do a director’s cut, but they can’t really do that final pass without me there. So on Saturdays I’d be there for like four or five hours doing that.

But, it was a lot of time, but it was also like I wasn’t married and didn’t have kids. It was my only goal in life was to have my own TV show. So, for me, it was like, eh, this is fun.

**John:** Your life is being inside the show.

**Mindy:** Yeah. My life is being on the show, so it was fine.

**John:** The one TV show that I did show run, I did find myself, like I would go through life and everything was just being sorted into two bins. Is that part of the show? Is that not part of the show? A song will play on the radio. Could that in the show? I felt like I was just constantly grabbing at things out in the real world and trying to put them in my little basket.

**Mindy:** It’s fun though isn’t it?

**John:** It is sort of fun. Anything that can happen out there you’re like, oh, this could be a thing. But I found myself, there was like a little red light that would come one. If we’re having this conversation it’s like, oh this kind of conversation could be in the show, which is – I’m not sure it was actually emotionally very healthy to do that.

**Mindy:** Oh interesting. You know, my character was so out there and it was all dating stories and I wasn’t dating at all, so I didn’t get a lot of that. But I would see would be like, “Oh, my assistant loves Workaholics.” I’m like, “Oh, that guy Anders Holm, they love him.” And like, “Oh, he should be a boyfriend on the show” and then he would be.

Or I would see Seth Rogan at an event and be like, “Oh, Seth should be on the show.” That’s fun to just find actors. And for a serial dating show it’s really fun to be like, oh, this guy is big on a Broadway play. And when you have a show, a TV show for theater people is actually like kind of fun and glamorous for them to come be on a TV show. Or Mark and Jay Duplass, I met them–

**John:** Oh my god, they’re great.

**Mindy:** They’re great. And they set a meeting with me because they wanted me to like either be in or – it was for me to be in a movie that they were going to produce. And nothing happened with the movie, but after meeting both of them I was like, oh, I want them to be on the show. And then they became the midwife brothers on the show. I only did this because Jay Duplass has said this many, many times that he credits me with kicking off his acting career, because he had never acted before then. And so that always fills me with pride.

**John:** They have such a weird Penn and Teller vibe as those characters. It was so disturbing.

**Mindy:** Penn and Teller vibe. That’s so funny. Yeah, that was – I always loved when those guys could come be on the show. They were so funny.

**John:** So, as you’re learning your lines over the weekend though, if there’s something you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t really working for me right,” could you just rewrite your lines?

**Mindy:** I could rewrite it. So in some ways it’s easy. It’s easier when the star of the show is also the showrunner, because it’s not one of these things where you’re like I hope, you cross your fingers and hope at the table read that the lead likes it/gets the joke. It made rewrites easier because for the most part I like knew what was going to happen. And so when we would rewrite things, we’d have to rewrite me a little bit, but it was mostly the other characters.

What became hard was that, at least when we were at Fox, it was like the notes we would get would be just – like that would keep us there for overnight Sundays/Saturdays. Because we would hear something and be like, “Oh, they don’t like this one character.” And you’re like, “OK, so we’ll write them off in a fun, believable way.” And they’re like, “No, they can’t be in the next episode.” So, you would say like you want us to get rid of that character without a sendoff? They’re like, yeah, they just – I don’t want to say the person I’m talking about, but they just don’t want to see them again.

And so we would get knocked a lot because there was a lot of characters that we were kind of – the edict was to just not see them again. And who would believe that the head of a network or development execs at a network would just say, “Yeah, they just can’t be in the next one. Our boss is going to freak out.” That that would actually be the case. So it just looks like, oh, Mindy didn’t like that person and wanted them off the show. And most of the time you’re like I hired this person. I would never want them to just to be off the show in this kind of way. It makes no sense.

**John:** So again, and we won’t talk about specific actors, but having watched I think almost every episode of your show, there were best friend characters or other friends. And so Mindy would have friends sometimes and not friends other times. And there was probably a focus question of like is this a work show or is this a Mindy’s home life show? Is that the kind of stuff that would come up?

**Mindy:** Well, you know, it was interesting. It was two things. If you look at 30 Rock or Parks and Rec, like Liz Lemon and Leslie Knope have no girlfriends accept for the people that they work with. And at the beginning of my show I was like, oh, it would be great if she had – I mean, I love Sex and the City. I would love for her to have girlfriends. But what ended up happening is we were at work so much, so you would end up having this thing of like how do we get the best friend at work.

For the record, I really loved having that – I liked that challenge. And we’ve always had great actors who would play my friends on the show. And then what would happen was that the network would say, “That stuff isn’t working. Cut it. We don’t want to see them.” But what it always felt like, and you have these fights where you’re like I don’t think people necessarily understand this when they watch a show. You have these fights of like I don’t want to do that. I want to write them a sendoff or I want to keep doing that. And it’s just like, “Do you want your show to continue on the air? No.” You have to like – and so you learn like, oh, things don’t work the way where you know it’s going to be better creatively.

And so I don’t know that other streaming platforms or cable networks don’t do that the same way, but I think there’s a reason why the comedies that most people are really enjoying are not on networks. Because I think that there’s these panicky edicts to get rid of things or change things up that make sometimes shows not work at the beginning.

So we were so lucky we came back after there was – I liked so much of the first season, but it was so rocky. Like some inconsistency, particularly the first 13 episodes where it was like this feels a little bit out of control. That kind of evened out in later seasons.

**John:** I don’t think this is true of your show, but there have been definitely shows I’ve seen the first season where it was clear they aired them out of order, or they just rejiggered the plan. Because a character is introduced in episode five but they actually showed up in episode three. It’s always so weird as the viewer to see–

**Mindy:** Well, they fall in love with an episode and they’re like, “Ooh, we want to air this now.” And I’m like a character has a broken arm in this episode that doesn’t have a broken arm in the previous one or something. It just doesn’t make any sense. And sometimes it’s coming from a good place. And it’s always a development exec who is just like, “We want to save the show. So we want to put the very best one next.” And you’re like “But it doesn’t make any sense.”

So, often it’s really coming from people who are, because there were so many big champions of our show at Fox. And a lot of times they’re like, “But we think this will help keep the show on the air and isn’t that the whole point?” So then you would do something, because yeah, I don’t want to have a six-episode show of a show that I really believed in that I didn’t make any compromises at all. And ultimately it was worth it that first – it was even just the first 13 episodes. Because at the end when we were in like Season 6 at Hulu they were like, hey, do you want to come back and do another season? And at that point I hadn’t realized like, oh, that’s such a rare thing, because I had gone from The Office to then Hulu, which was like you want to keep doing it?

And Craig Erwich is such a feeling of supporting it. It was like, yeah, you can do it as long as you wanted. And I was like, no. I was like, no, I want to go be in like A Wrinkle in Time and Ocean’s 8 and go do movies for a while. Being like, oh yeah, that will be done in like a year. But it is nice to see what other kind of characters I can play.

**John:** Can we talk about Champions, because I tweeted at you because I loved Champions so much.

**Mindy:** Oh, thank you. I loved it, too.

**John:** I was really impressed by the pilot because I’ve never written a half-hour pilot, but sort of the density of what a half-hour pilot has to do in terms of establishing the premise, the characters, the unique voices for the characters. I felt like every line in that pilot had to do like five jobs in terms of establishing these guys are brothers, they own this gym, their father died. He had a kid by this woman he hasn’t seen all this time. Now she’s dropping—

It was such a–

**Mindy:** It was so dense with plot and things.

**John:** It was like a full two-hour movie that had to be crammed into this little 30-minute thing, but it felt – everything was just nipped and tucked just so delightfully.

**Mindy:** Oh, thank you. That’s so nice.

**John:** So it was you and Charlie–

**Mindy:** Charlie Grandy.

**John:** And so what was the genesis of that pilot?

**Mindy:** I think with Charlie and I, because we had worked together for so long on so many different shows, I wanted to do – because I came to him with the idea. I think we both – we wanted to do something different than Mindy, but I wanted to do a young gay character. And I wanted to write for a guy. Because I’d been writing for Mindy for so long.

It’s crazy, because J.J. Totah who played the lead in that show–

**John:** He’s just remarkable.

**Mindy:** He’s so remarkable. But we didn’t know he existed before we wrote that part. So we wrote this really specific part of a half-Indian like very theatrical confident but with some vulnerabilities, this character, which is so specific. And then we found this young kid who played the part completely, but it was one of those things when we were auditioning we were like what the hell did we do? It’s not just a young teenage kid that’s a great actor, and singer, and dancer, which is already so hard to find. We’re like he has to be half-Indian, or look half-Indian. So that was incredible.

And writing for that voice was really fun because I love characters who want to come to New York and be strivers and are chatty and enter a room and they kind of like download their entire deal. And so he was like Mindy in some ways, but he had this vulnerability because he didn’t have a dad. So it was a really, really fun show to work on.

**John:** The other character I thought you had a great original voice for was the Andy Favreau character whose name I don’t remember. Dim-witted, but in a very different kind of dim-witted than I usually see in these shows. He was so good-natured and Canadian in sort of an odd way. And that brotherly dynamic is a thing we don’t–

**Mindy:** That’s funny. Matthew. Andy is so funny. And Matthew was just like, yeah, in some ways he could have seen just kind of stock, but he was smart about certain things and he was super moral. And also like really ambitious about the gym. And I remember he would always talk about like we thought it was really fun that he thought the most important familial relationship was between uncle and nephew. He’s like that’s the most valuable relationship. He didn’t really come alive until he discovered he had a nephew. That really fulfilled him. He was just a really sweet, funny character. And I mean Andy was so funny playing that part.

**John:** So writing with Charlie on this pilot, what is the process and what’s the give and take of figuring out like who wants what and sort of who is responsible for what?

**Mindy:** I love writing with another person. That was kind of the first time since I’d written Matt and Ben that I’d written with a writing partner. And what was great about writing with Charlie was I was shooting Ocean’s 8 at the time in New York and he was in LA. So we spent two or three months meeting, because Mindy was still happening. So we would meet on the weekend and then before work.

So we broke the story and carded it onto a board. And then what we did was – I think this is what we did. I took the blue cards and he took the red cards. And we just outlined it. We wrote what each scene would kind of be. I moved to New York. We’re in the middle of our outline. We had our respective assistants. Mine was in New York and his was in LA. Like Frankenstein them together, the cards. And then we had this kind of rough document that didn’t – it made sense, but it was tonally all totally different and all over the place. And you got to see like, oh, he really like sparked to this aspect of this guy’s character and I sparked to this. And you learn a lot. And it’s so much fun.

And then what we did was we massaged the document tonally into one thing. He would do a pass on it, and then I would do a pass on his pass. And so we had this outline which we then submitted–

**John:** How many pages long was this kind of outline?

**Mindy:** So, towards the end of Mindy we started doing really long outlines that were really detailed because it took the edge off of that horrible feeling you have of a blank page when you’re writing a script. So our outlines were often like 27 pages long.

**John:** Oh wow.

**Mindy:** And a script is like 32 pages.

**John:** So suggesting the dialogue but not really having blocked out?

**Mindy:** Sometimes we would write the dialogue to begin with. But it was like a Microsoft Word document. And then what’s great is then we would just when you put the Microsoft Word outline that has dialogue but just like in block form and you put that into a Final Draft document you’re like, “This script is like written.” It’s like 31 pages already.

And then that to me always makes me feel better. And the great thing about breaking everything together to that level of detail is that when you’re looking over it with your writing partner you’re like, “Oh, I kind of think that they shouldn’t make this decision and this beat should be two beats later.” So that when you’re actually writing the script it’s kind of really fun. Because you’re fleshing out the thing that’s already been really, really established. You can’t mess up. You can just make it better.

That’s something that we kind of figured out at The Mindy Project which is why when we were at Hulu it just made everything so efficient and no writer came in with a draft that was like bad because we had done so much room work on the actual outline.

**John:** Cool. Now, you’re in the room right now. What are you working on?

**Mindy:** I’m working on a miniseries, a ten-episode miniseries that’s an adaptation of the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral.

**John:** Holy cow. That feels exactly in your wheelhouse.

**Mindy:** Yeah. Well, you know, Richard Curtis is such a genius and has such a distinct voice. And it wasn’t until I was adapting someone else’s distinct voice that I was like, “Oh, I think I have a distinct voice and it’s not the same as this person’s voice.” So it’s been interesting being like, well, people are really – if they wanted to watch Four Weddings and a Funeral as an adaptation into a miniseries what would that look like? And what did they want knowing that I’m doing it?

So I’m trying to fulfill the promise of people who want to see that while also being like, OK, this is through the eyes of Mindy Kaling. And the biggest change that we made is the lead is an African American girl. And the male lead is a British Pakistani man. And so already I’m like, OK, I feel like I can get onboard with these two leads.

**John:** And so right now are you just blue-skying, or you’re breaking episodes? What happens in this part of the room?

**Mindy:** We just finished blue-skying which is the most fun period of preproduction and now we’re going into breaking the first episode. I mean, the first episode is actually written, so we’re doing episode two, which is a little bit harder. Less fun.

**John:** So a listener wrote in with a question which I thought would be a perfect question for you. So we’ll try to answer this question. Iris in Philadelphia writes, “I’ve been developing my first feature film and I’m putting a lot of thought into point of view. The film is an unconventional romance. The majority of the film is through the point of view of the protagonist. How do I shift the POV at one key point in the film? Do you find that certain genres lend themselves to using POV in different ways?”

So POV is a crucial thing for the things you’ve written. The Office of course has that documentary conceit. Four Weddings and a Funeral, at what point are you approaching POV in figuring out your stories? And who can drive a scene by themselves?

**Mindy:** Wow. I can talk about it more from TV than features because I’ve only written like two features. But I will say that in TV it’s kind of trial and error. You see like, OK, we know – at least in The Mindy Project we’re like we know Danny can do a POV story. We know Mindy can. Adam Pally seems to be able to be and that character.

And then sometimes you’ll do a character on the show and it’s somehow not working. And it’s often because as a POV character we didn’t take the time at the beginning. You have to establish who are the leads and who are the secondary characters. And it’s a real thing. And when you have a secondary character they only reveal themselves as a secondary character when they try to have a story. And it just is not as interesting.

And I think that we did that on The Office, too. It’s like there were five characters who could hold a story. And if you tried to do that with someone else–

**John:** A Phyllis story wouldn’t make a lot of sense in The Office.

**Mindy:** It wouldn’t. And she would have things, like Phyllis’s wedding was the name of a story. She would often be like the cover story of an episode, but it really revealed itself. And that’s something you do at the very beginning. You have to decide, particularly in a comedy, that you’re not burn your characters off for jokes and make it so that you wouldn’t be able – that they’re not a fully three-dimensional POV character. It’s actually something that on Four Weddings we really want there to be – it’s an hour-long, so more than ever you really need these strong POV characters. You can’t have funny secondary characters where you make up some crazy backstory for them for a joke and you sacrifice something that’s their character just to do a comedy bit.

And so on Four Weddings we’ve been like, OK, this is an hour-long, so more than two characters have to be able to have story. So, it’s like eight characters have to be fully three-dimensional characters. And I think film is great that way. There’s a believability thing that movies have to have that sitcoms don’t have to have, I think, where it’s like, no, we demand all the characters be fully three-dimensionalized characters with active internal lives that you don’t necessarily have to have on a sitcom.

**John:** Well, the other difference between a TV series and a feature is that a feature generally you’re following a character on a journey they would only take once. And like that character is going to change over the course of this movie. But on a TV series you have to be able to come back to these characters again and again. So what you’re saying about not burning off a character for a joke, because you’re going to need them for like the next ten episodes, or even in a short-run like this you’re going to need them for later on. And you’ve got to make sure that it actually tracks and feels real.

**Mindy:** Well, it’s interesting because if you have like the character I played on The Office, Kelly, you only need her for like a joke or two an episode. So it’s OK that she has like insane backstory or big dramatic characteristics/personality traits and things, but you couldn’t do that for almost anyone else otherwise it would just be like only Steve Carell being able to do anything and you actually care.

So, that’s something I feel like I learned on The Mindy Project where I was like, oh, things are going to get really fucking exhausting for me if we don’t flesh out some of these other characters and so you really care about them and their journeys.

I don’t think this answered her question. Sorry Iris.

**John:** I think it did. This was good. We did a whole episode on POV and this was sort of a follow up question on that. But I think we couldn’t talk about it in TV the way that you could talk about it in TV, so thank you for that.

**Mindy:** Of course.

**John:** At the end of our shows we do a One Cool Thing. I think I emailed you to warn you about this.

**Mindy:** Yes. Yeah.

**John:** So do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Mindy:** Oh yeah. My One Cool Thing is a show on Netflix that I just started watching called The End of the Fucking World.

**John:** I heard it’s great. I want to watch it.

**Mindy:** It’s so good. Well, what it does is that it’s incredibly stylish. It’s very dark. And it does something at the very beginning – this isn’t a spoiler – where the lead character kills a cat because he’s a psychopath. And you’re like, whoa, according to books that I’ve read about screenwriting and writing you’re supposed to save the cat. So, I thought that was really bold and it’s just incredibly stylish. It’s really well directed, which I never used to care about how things were directed or think about it.

And then the other thing I’ve watched which I love is the miniseries Godless, which I really want women to watch because I think they see western – I don’t know, did you see Godless?

**John:** I did. Scott Frank was a guest on the show and it’s remarkable.

**Mindy:** It’s so great. And I think when you see western I think a lot of women are like, eh, that’s not something I’m all that interested in watching. But two of the great characters in it are women in roles that I think are just awesome that I have never seen in any movie. So I just loved that miniseries. And it don’t think there’s going to be a season two. It doesn’t seem like it’s that kind of thing. Did he tell you?

**John:** I haven’t heard about a season two.

**Mindy:** But I just loved it. Merritt Weaver’s role is so great. And Michelle Dockery is fantastic in it. So those are my two. What’s your thing?

**John:** My One Cool Thing is we went down to the Broad this last week, so the museum in Downtown Los Angeles. And it’s all remarkable. But this room we went in at the very end, and I typically don’t go into those video installation rooms because I didn’t come to a museum to see video, but it’s this amazing thing done called The Visitors. And it’s this installation by Ragnar Kjartansson – I’m butchering his name – but it is a bunch of Icelandic folks who went to this house in Upstate New York and they hung out at this old decrepit farmhouse. And they start singing this song. And the song goes on for like an hour. But they’re all in different rooms. They all have headphones on and their singing in their microphones. And the song just sort of keeps repeating.

But you’re seeing it on all these different screens around the room, so as you wander around you get close to somebody. You can hear them sing their song or play whatever instrument they’re singing. And eventually they all kind of come together and leave. And it was just beautiful. It was like kind of being inside the space of once in a way. It was just really remarkable.

So, if you’re downtown for any reason I would recommend go to the Broad, but also check out this really remarkable film installation thing called The Visitors. I think it’s there through January.

**Mindy:** That’s so great. Because when you said The Visitors I was like, ah, this is some slasher thing. I always go to horror movies. So that’s the opposite of a horror movie. That sounds great.

**John:** But I have this aspiration of just like hanging out with a group of sort of like grungy people and like singing songs in a farmhouse. And then you get to sort of be with that group of people and it’s remarkable. So, check it out.

**Mindy:** Cool.

**John:** And that’s our show. So our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Timothy Vajda. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the one we answered today.

For short questions, Twitter is great. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Mindy, what are you on Twitter?

**Mindy:** I’m @mindykaling.

**John:** You’re also @mindykaling on Instagram? Correct?

**Mindy:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** You can find us on Apple Podcasts and starting today on Spotify. So, just search for Scriptnotes and while you’re there leave us a review. That helps people find the show.

Transcripts for the show go up about four days after the episode airs. You can find them at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the show notes for things we talked about on the show.

But most importantly I want to thank Mindy Kaling. It was so great to finally meet you and talk with you about writing stuff.

**Mindy:** Yeah. It was so good to be here. It’s funny, when you talk about your childhood or like your teen hood and how you became a writer, I was like I don’t want to revisit that. But I was glad I did.

**John:** Yeah, it’s fun. So, Mindy, thanks so much.

**Mindy:** Thanks.

Links:

* Thanks to [Mindy Kaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindy_Kaling) for joining us!
* [Champions](https://www.nbc.com/champions) is available to watch on NBC.com.
* You can watch a recording of her play, [Matt and Ben](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBbMv3gO0lo), written and performed by Mindy and Brenda Withers. It premiered at the [Fringe Festival](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_International_Fringe_Festival) in New York.
* Keep an eye out for [Four Weddings and a Funeral](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/mindy-kalings-four-weddings-a-funeral-anthology-a-go-at-hulu-1106794).
* [The End of the Fucking World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_F***ing_World) and [Godless](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godless_(TV_series)) on Netflix
* [The Visitors](https://www.thebroad.org/art/ragnar-kjartansson/the-visitors) by Ragnar Kjartansson at The Broad
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [Mindy Kaling](https://twitter.com/mindykaling) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Timothy Vajda ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_362.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is off on assignment this week but luckily we have not one but two people on deck to fill in. Susanna Fogel is a writer-producer whose credits include Life Partners, Chasing Life, and this new movie The Spy Who Dumped Me, which she also directed. Welcome Susanna.

Susanna Fogel: Hi, thanks for having me.

John: And also we have her writing partner on that film, David Iserson. His credits as a writer and producer include Graves, Mr. Robot, Mad Man, New Girl, Up All Night, and Saturday Night Live.

David Iserson: Hi.

John: David, welcome.

David: Thank you for having me. I’m a big fan of the show. So this is like – I can live in my fan boy fantasy of being on Scriptnotes.

John: Well, with the two of you here I want to talk about some film and TV stuff, because you’ve both worked in film and in television. I want to talk about action comedies. But mostly I want to get started by talking about how you guys came to write this movie together, because when I went to the screening last night I had assumed that you guys were always writing partners and that I would go through your credits and they would all be the same credits and your only shared credit that I could find was The Spy Who Dumped Me. So what caused you two guys to write this movie together?

Susanna: And it will be the last shared credit. I will be taking credit for everything from now on.

David: Once we leave this recording we will never speak again. Susanna and I met a few years ago at a Christmas dinner that a different writer friend threw. And we had a ton of mutual friends. It was weird that we had never met. And we just became sort of instant pals, shared a lot of the same taste, and we looked at each other’s work and we realized that we had a lot of shared things in common. And then we just started writing our own things in the same room as each other. We would go to the same coffee shops.

Susanna: Like a workout buddy.

David: Yeah, just kind of keep each other honest. We would go work on our own things at the same table and talk about whatever problems we were having in our own scripts. And we did that for a while.

Susanna: And then we sort of saw each other through creative heartbreaks on both of our sides. You know, we both had projects we were excited about crumble before our very eyes and supported each other through that and then it became like a shared venting about how hard it was to get anything produced, especially in our sort of small indie dramedy tone. And then we started dreaming really big about sort of seeing if there was a way to combine that with our fanboy and fangirl attitude towards these big tent pole movies that we never thought of writing but loved to see. And wondered if maybe there was a way to sort of adjust the framework of telling the same kinds of stories.

John: So, before you guys are working in the same shared space, same shared coffee shop, you had very different trajectories. So the first time I became aware of your stuff, Susanna, was you’d done Life Partners which was a Sundance Labs project. And so talk about that journey. Did you really see yourself as a person who was supposed to be doing indie film and TV was another thing that came up? How did you see your career over the last ten years? What did you think your trajectory was going to be?

Susanna: Well, I had sort of grown up in that sort of mid-‘90s New York indie film world. I’m from the east coast. I went to college in New York City. I did internships at Good Machine and Fine Line and all those companies in Downtown New York where I really did dream of being like Nicole Holofcener and that was kind of where it stopped and started. Started and stopped.

And I think the reality was that by the time I moved out to LA to sort of figure out how I could try to become that the industry was starting to change really quickly and, you know, both because of the economic collapse and the writers’ strike and also just because of the Internet and the nature of the over-saturation of content it sort of became less and less hospitable to movies like that, at least in the cinematic like first-run movie world that you dream about when you’re trying to become a director.

So, to me it sort of was a moment of just trying to figure out how to actually get something produced because I would keep writing these small heartfelt like indie dramedies with women in the lead roles and they just weren’t getting made. So, to support myself I sort of got in the studio writing assignment game which is one where it’s a total crap shoot whether you get something made or not. You have no control over that often as a writer.

So, it wasn’t creatively rewarding but it was just enough to sort of stay afloat. But I started to adjust my idea of what I could sort of actually do as a director and see get produced and how I could start to climb that ladder. And then, you know, after having a project fall apart that I loved, it was a Black List script that I wrote with a friend who I wrote with for many years, we kind of had one heartbreak too many and we decided to write a one-act play just to actually put something up that wouldn’t cost very much that we could actually just direct and see in front of an audience. And that one-act became the script for Life Partners, which then became a Sundance Lab project and then actually did – we did find financing for that, but it kind of felt like a lightning in a bottle situation. And then after making that movie, which was rewarding, I noticed that the landscape didn’t change that much.

Like it’s not like there were a lot of opportunities to make more movies like that now that I had proven myself. It was more that that market was still tiny. And at the same time we had the opportunity to adapt a Mexican format, like sort of My So-Called Life with Cancer for lack of a better description, Mexican show that became Chasing Life which was our Lionsgate ABC Family show that was on for a couple of seasons.

So, that was a great opportunity to write and see things produced. And I got to direct a few episodes and that was great. But my dream was still to go back to writing and directing features. I just wasn’t sure how to do that in the sort of current climate of getting movies made.

John: Now, David, looking at your credits it looks like you’re mostly a television writer, but were you also writing features during that time, too?

David: When I moved out to Los Angeles after college, my intention was purely to be a feature writer. My dream was to sit in a movie theater and see my name on a movie. And when I started, when I moved out here I got a job in development. I read a bunch of scripts. And I answered phones and I was a receptionist. And I did that job for like a year and a half. And those jobs really suck all of your kind of life force out of you. And I came out here to write but I was not able to write.

So, at like kind of this spur of hubris I quit that job, but I knew I just kind of had like less than three weeks of money before I needed to find a different job. So I burst out like a feature script that I’d had just sort of brewing in my head forever and I was excited and encouraged. And then a year passed and no one read it, but eventually that script got me representation and that script got me a bunch of jobs. And I did a lot of feature work, but not any feature work that had been made. And in the meantime before that I almost sort of like stumbled into a joke-writing job.

I started emailing jokes to Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live. And I got enough of those on the air that they hired me for the following season. And my tenure at SNL was – what’s the word – inauspicious. And then I came back to LA and I wrote these movies that never got produced. And then the writer’s strike that was 10 years ago happened and I realized, oh, I don’t know any writers. I have this very lonely job. Every time I write a script and it doesn’t get made I feel like I have to start all over again. And TV had just started becoming something really special and what has now just sort of blown up since then.

So then I started working in TV and all the while I was trying to write movies in between, on weekends, kept sort of hustling through doing that as well all the while while I was sort of juggling my TV jobs.

John: A question for both of you. I mean, you had the opportunity to do TV shows. You could have done your own TV shows or kept going in TV show land. Why keep going back to features? It feels like you both had a bunch of hidden work where you’re writing these features that never got made. At a certain point don’t you just decide to make what they’re making and just go into television? Why keep going back to the feature land?

David: I mean, for me I feel that decision was made for me. I mean, my creative heartbreak that brought us together to write this was a pilot that I loved that died. And I’ve had a lot of pilots that never got made. I think that for me the part of my brain that writes TV and the part of my brain that writes film are pretty similar. So I think that we just somehow got a movie that we loved that was written in the way that we wanted it written and produced in the way we wanted it produced, got made in a time when film is seemingly virtually dead and all of the attention is on TV, that just happened to be our moment to make the movie we wanted to make.

Susanna: Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is just seeing the feature business that does exist and feeling like there was something missing there. To the extent that movies were getting made and there weren’t a lot of good female-driven movies getting made, or female-driven movies getting made that had like sort of a more muscular tone to them. I just felt like there was a lack of that. And that there would be a hunger for it the way that I feel like every few years there would be a movie like Bridesmaids that people would think was going to sort of change the tides of what movies got made and it never really had that seismic effect that we all thought it would.

But there just seemed to be this lack of a certain kind of story and I think just as a viewer and consumer it bothered me. It just felt like an injustice. So, I think that frustration sparked the conversation that led to the movie. So, it was more just kind of almost like an act of rebellion and less a need to work in that format.

John: So, let’s talk about that conversation that led to the movie. So, what do you guys separately and together remember about those first discussions of this idea and should we write this idea together and what it would be? What was that conversation like, or conversations?

Susanna: Well, there are a few parts to this. The first part was that we decided that we were going to try to write something together that was a big fun comedy that we would encourage each other to not fall into some of our like indie traps that we normally would fall into that make things smaller, and smaller, and smaller.

John: What are those traps? Can we talk through some more of those pitfalls?

David: Let’s see, it’s stifling yourself when it comes to budget. You know, thinking like we can’t do that. That’s too big, too much. Kind of ending things, not necessarily in triumphs.

John: Ending things in ambiguity or reality, sort of a mixed bag.

Susanna: Trying to have more of a bittersweet slice of life kind of ending, which is our personal – those are the movies that, you know, we love seeing movies like Sing Street that sort of make you feel sad and laugh through your tears which I think is our personal shared taste sometimes. But we were like, you know what, let’s try to just have fun with this and make each other laugh and see if we can’t come up with something that just feels a little bit more like a feel good entertaining movie.

So, we then embarked on a series of walks around the Silver Lake Reservoir where we brainstormed. No bad ideas. Safe space. The biggest ideas we could think of. The most high concept ideas. This reminded me of when I was 21 and trying to do this and had some exceptionally bad ideas.

David: We had some exceptionally bad ideas.

Susanna: We had some bad ideas. I mean—

David: We had some great ideas that she thinks is bad.

Susanna: We still debate about whether a movie entitled Ghost Hookup would or would not be a good movie.

David: It would be a great movie.

Susanna: I think it’s – I think we’ve moved past it.

John: I mean, it could potentially be a great movie, but it’s also a great parody for that kind of movie.

Susanna: Therein lies the debate.

John: Absolutely. Is it a 30-second skit or is it actually a movie.

David: Exactly.

Susanna: We’re still not – we still have not settled that discussion.

David: So, Susanna – I woke up one morning to an email from Susanna where she sent me an article, a New York Times article, about World War II or something like that. And I don’t remember what the article was about, but there was something in the subject line that was like, “This is an interesting story. This is not the kind of movie that they would let us write.” And we had lunch that day and I started thinking about the kind of movie that we would not be expected to write. Some sort of big, muscular action movie. But then we started talking about what kind of characters we love. Like characters that are like us.

I write a lot of female-driven things and Susanna does too, so we talked about two friends who are ill-equipped to belong in a very big action, muscular, explosion-filled car chase world.

Susanna: Like what would really – there’s a whole world of observational humor that we find endlessly fascinating. And what if you put that sort of lens on this very glossy genre. Like if you think about Jason Bourne having to pee in the middle of something and he just really has to pee and it’s not a good time but he has to do it. Just the very human things that these characters do that those movies never focus on. And then we figured there would be some comedy there and that that was worth looking at, without making a parody of a spy movie or like making an arch action comedy. Could we actually just drop ourselves, or our avatars for us into a big movie and see if it felt original?

John: Our last episode of Scriptnotes was about relationships and the sense that all movies are fundamentally about relationships and that you don’t – you can say that you have a character and you’re following that character, but you can’t understand anything about that character unless there’s someone for that character to interact with, a relationship that they can have.

And so in your case you have these two women and we’d have a very hard time understanding either woman independently if we didn’t have the other one there to sort of mirror back and sort of fill in the details of who that person is and let us see the differences between the two going into it.

Now, some of the tropes we would expect though is if we have these two women, at some point they’re going to fight and they’re going to break up and have to come back together. And that the relationship has to grow and arc and change over the course of it. Your movie doesn’t really do that at all. So is that a conscious decision?

Susanna: Yeah. That’s something that we felt really strongly about. I mean, you can speak to that a bit, too.

David: Yeah. The earliest conversation we felt that a movie like this typically would build these false stakes into the characters breaking up. And I think that a lot of times in screenwriting I think people confuse what conflict needs to be. And we didn’t feel like we needed to build a false conflict between these two characters where they’re breaking up over something small when their lives and the world is at stake. We felt that the conflict came so rapid fire at them, while people are shooting at them, while people are chasing them, while people are dying all around them that we didn’t need to have some sort of what we call in writers’ rooms “schmuck bait” where they break up and we know that they’re going to get back together in the end.

It just didn’t feel exciting to us. And we just wanted to tell a story about friendship where these people love each other and they’re going to be friends before, they’re going to be friends after, and they’re going to be friends through whatever we put them through in this movie.

John: What was the writing process like for you guys? You talked through probably the broad strokes of the idea. And what point did you sit down to officially start writing? Were you writing together? Were you dividing up scenes? What was the writing process like for you guys to work together?

Susanna: We were both unemployed at the time, so we had a lot of time. And we started a sort of obsessive flow state few weeks sitting in the lobby of the Lion Hotel, surrounded by other people writing screenplays in the lobby of the Lion Hotel. And just we’d get there first thing in the morning and we would basically just kind of channel these characters and talk as the characters and someone would write it down and we would actually just – we started with an outline that we did together. And once we had that we would just open your screenwriting program, Highland, and start riffing and start writing things down, even the bad version. And it sort of came out of us really quickly.

Now we’re trying to write something else and it’s a much harder process. And I think we realized that we – you can’t necessarily expect things to be as easy and fun as they are when they are at their most easy and fun. And it doesn’t mean the script is not good, but in that case I think just fueled by this like we had nothing to lose in a weird way. We didn’t have anything to do. We wanted to prove ourselves.

David: We were really angry.

Susanna: Yeah. We were annoyed. We would like take breaks to check the industry news, which you should never do anyway. But we did and we’d see people selling stuff that felt like, god, I’ve seen that before. And we’re going to do something really original. And just kind of leveraging that to make ourselves work harder and up our game basically. I don’t know.

David: Yeah. I had written with other people on TV shows, but I’d never really had a partner before. So for me there was no value in just having her write a scene, me write a scene, and us merging it together. We wanted to elevate both of us by just sitting there and make each other laugh. And we would start to adopt the voices of the different character and we would just start speaking like that. And we would do that publicly. And we were shameless about it. But we wrote this script incredibly fast and–

John: How many weeks or how long to write it?

David: I’m only going to brag about this because we’ve had things go so slowly and not happen at all, so from the idea to the completion of the script was a month. And then a year from there we were in front of the cameras, or we were behind the cameras. We weren’t in front of the cameras. The cameras were rolling.

Susanna: You had a cameo in front of the camera.

David: I had one line. And then a year from that we were filming the movie in a year, from that is now.

Susanna: Yeah.

John: That’s crazy. So that’s an incredibly fast turnaround on that. Before we get into production, I want to make sure we circle back and highlight the fact that you said that you wrote this in Highland, the application that I made. And Highland gets a frequent callout in the movie because Highland is…?

David: Highland is the bad guy organization behind it which we named because we looked at our program and that was the first word we saw. I don’t know if we’re on the show just to pitch Highland, but we will do it anyway. For writing a script fast and making it fun and having the flow go really, really smoothly, we used Highland and it was great.

Susanna: Yeah. I used to write everything in Microsoft Word just because I wanted to see all the dialogue in one page. I just wanted to see a whole scene laid out in a simpler way where I could look at the totality of it and not get bogged down in formatting. And not have everything spaced out so much that I would have to engage with my computer to just read a scene. And this reminded me of that. Like I trained myself not to have to write in Word just to save time, but Highland enables you to do that, which is great.

John: Thank you. That’s really not an ad for it.

Susanna: We know. But we are more than happy to advertise it. I’ve been pushing it on everyone.

David: Yeah. We paid full price for it.

John: Nice. So, you’ve written the script in a month. At what point do you start to show it to other folks? Do you show it to your representatives? At what point do you feel like this is a script that we might take out on the town or get to people who might be able to make this movie?

David: Immediately.

Susanna: Yeah. We had both – I think in part because we felt like we had nothing to lose because we had no jobs and no one was expecting this of us and we didn’t really talk about it with agents or anyone too much because we – understandably they would have probably been like, “What are you talking about? That’s not your thing. What do you mean? Ok, you guys can…”

We just didn’t want to hear any discouragement or even questions. We just wanted to prove it to them. And I think to us that was kind of – I don’t know, I think that that was for the best. And I’m glad that we – it’s kind of a lesson in – I used to constantly ask agents and managers kind of for permission to write a thing or “What do you think.? Do you like this idea? Do you like that idea?” And then very rarely did they say, “Yes, that’s a great idea.” Their job is to say here are the other things that are like that and here’s why it’s not.

So, we kind of just decided to incubate the process and not expose it to that, which I think was a really good decision and one that I wish I learned earlier. Who knows what scripts could have been written that I stopped thinking about after one phone call to an agent?

But I don’t know. We also talked a lot about what our attitudes would be for getting it made, kind of anticipating that people would want to attach a director that was experienced with movies like this and they were kind of all older male directors. And that seemed wrong. It didn’t have to be a woman, but we couldn’t even think of the right guy to do this. And so we were like kind of preemptively wondering how to empower ourselves the best and asking that question of what do we need. Do we need to sell something quickly because we have bills to pay or can we take the longer game approach and kind of keep ownership of this as long as possible? And that’s just a decision that’s personal to everyone, but I think this one we approached it very differently in terms of a strategy than we ever had approached anything either of us had ever done by deciding to hang onto it and be aggressively—

You know, when it started to pick up steam a bit, we didn’t want to sell it. We didn’t want to sort of give up that power, which was not always an easy decision because we were also struggling and unemployed.

John: Well, let’s talk about the process. So you sent it to your representative. They’ve read it. They said this is great. Traditionally you make a list of these are the people we would want to go out to. You sort of sign off on that list. It leaks out beyond those places. But in that initial conversation with your reps you have to say like, “And Susanna is going to direct it?” Or we want to hold onto it in some producorial way? Like what were you actually saying to your reps at that point?

David: We wanted it to get made. And I think that was the biggest thing that we were contending with. We didn’t want a scenario where we were going to just develop this forever and then let it sort of peter away. So I think we discussed amongst ourselves that if there was too much resistance in having you direct it then we would reassess that. But weirdly there wasn’t a lot of resistance to it, which was great.

Susanna: There was sort of – I mean, I think it’s that thing where it’s the sort of waiting for permission to do a thing problem where in the moment when we said even, OK, if we can’t get it made – even floating the idea out there was kind of a scary thing, but like ultimately it was – when we talked to our teams they were like, “Well, you know, it is a really big leap and maybe it’s too…” You know, it’s hard to make a movie of this scope because we had blue-skied everything and not thought about budget. That’s a really big jump. My first movie was well under $1 million. I had no action experience whatsoever. The only proof that I could do it is that I wrote it, so I understood the tone of it and what it wanted to be. But beyond that executionally there wasn’t any proof of that.

I feel like if I had hedged on that, or said, “Yeah, I’d love to, but let’s see what the options are,” I think that could have opened up space for more doubt and more trying different other paths.

John: So maybe the good advice here would be say like you came in strongly saying I’m directing this movie, and if there were no takers you were prepared between the two of you to sort of go to another place that someone could have made the movie, as long as it was getting made. Your priority was the movie getting made, and you being attached as the director was really part of that goal of getting it made.

Because we’ve all been through situations where a director is attached and then suddenly that director has three other projects he’s attached to and you fall back on the list. And it doesn’t happen.

Susanna: Yeah. I guess if there’s a lesson there it’s obviously have a plan B and be flexible privately, but don’t lead with that because if people are just generally a little bit more risk averse they’re going to take that seed of doubt and maybe everything will just get confusing and diffused. But if you just come in strong with something, you wait till someone says, “I will make it, but not with you directing it, but here’s this other director.” Let them sell you on another option and then make that decision.

But it did start to feel like things were changing a bit in terms of the female director conversation and people feeling like they really needed to clean up their acts in terms of that. When we left for Europe we kind of left and it was sort of one way. And then we got back, it had totally exploded and it seemed like it was so, so receptive. But we kind of like were out of the country for that shift.

John: Did Weinstein happen while you guys were overseas?

David: Weinstein happened right after we got back.

Susanna: Yeah. It seemed like people were excited about making a female-driven movie. Actresses were excited to be sent something like this because there wasn’t anything else like this out there for them. And it came together pretty quickly because of – I don’t want to skip ahead of the step-by-step of it all – but basically Kate’s Saturday Night Live schedule expedited everything. And gave us I think this unique position of leverage to say like we have to make the movie this summer. Who is doing it with us? It is happening. As opposed to that usual dance where you’re kind of like – your schedule is the least important. I mean, you’re sort of waiting to see when actors are free, but it’s always this chicken and egg that’s like endless until there’s a green light, in my experience.

But, yeah, in this case we had just one window and that was that.

John: That was it. So, let’s figure out sort of how pieces came together.

Susanna: We’ll get back.

John: So your reps have the script. You’re starting to send out the script. People are reading it. So Kate McKinnon reads it before it’s actually set up some place? Is that correct?

David: We had gotten a producer at that point.

John: And producer was Imagine, or produced with somebody else?

David: Producer was Imagine.

Susanna: And honestly that was an interesting thing because the agents have their ideas and their lists. And what they know is what companies tell them they’re looking for. And so they’ve got a targeted list, but it’s not necessarily exhaustively covering all the people who secretly want to do movies like that. So, I happened to randomly have a meeting – I was in New York working on a book. And I had a random meeting with this producer named Julie Oh who was Imagine’s New York person. And she was kind of in her 20s, really hungry. Had worked at the Weinstein Company and various places but kind of had the spirit of an indie producer in this job working for Ron Howard.

And I just really loved her and got along with her and she seemed to have this fearlessness that I associated with indie producers. And just confidence. And so she said, “You know, this is not an Imagine movie. This isn’t like our usual thing, but like screw it, I’m going to bring it to the staff meeting. Let’s just see. Let them say no.”

So even though it was sort of not their brand, she walked it in there and then they were like, oh, well, why couldn’t this be our brand? Let’s do it. We have the infrastructure. And that’s how Imagine came to the project.

John: Great. So Imagine comes on as producer. Traditionally they would go through Universal, but it wasn’t a Universal movie. It felt like it could have been a Universal movie.

David: They had just changed their deal. They didn’t have Universal at that moment.

Susanna: And so we went to Kate first just because she had had a small cameo in my first movie. And I knew her a little bit. And we had heard that she was looking for an action comedy with women. So we met her and she was excited to do it. And then with that package we took it out to the studios with our super aggressive, pushy like ultimatum of you have to do the movie this summer, which is kind of an unheard of schedule for a studio at that budget level.

John: Yeah. But I mean also I think what’s potentially exciting for a studio is they want a movie and suddenly there’s going to be a movie. So they see like, “OK, this is a thing. If we actually pull the trigger here we can make a movie and have it come out a year from now.”

Susanna: Yeah. I mean, I think we’ve re-fallen in love with the idea of writing spec scripts as opposed to trying to set things up or pitch them. Which doesn’t mean we wouldn’t do that. But we had a very positive experience just putting down our ideas and our words in our style and then having a thing to really talk about instead of the time you spend trying to explain why something is funny or why something is compelling.

David: Yeah, I mean, Susanna and I want to get a tattoo that say “Specs Forever.” And when I was starting out and I would pitch things I would get a call back from my agent and say, “Well, you know, they said you seemed really nervous.” Which of course I was nervous. But the movie was never going to be me standing in front of the screen dictating what happened. But, you know, pitches are nerve-wracking and it rewards people who are really—

Susanna: Performative.

David: Performative. I get that. Which is not necessarily anything to do with the process of when you’re sitting there writing. And so it is a big time risk, I suppose, to write a script, to write a spec script. But pitches also take a long time to put together. And when you write a spec script you’re putting everything on the page. You’re telling them what the tone is. You’re telling them who the character is in a way that is hard to describe but—

Susanna: Especially in comedy.

David: Yeah. But exists on the page. And they can see it. And they can love it or they can hate it. And they can make that decision. And to us it felt very empowering. Now, I know, spec market isn’t what it was when I moved out here, but I think that it’s hopeful that we were somehow able to work within it.

John: So you say “Specs Forever.” And I definitely get the logic of that, or sort of the emotional logic of this, because right now I’m writing something for a studio and it’s a project I’m really excited about, but in the pitching of it I realized that of the five people in the room each of them has a slightly different version in their head about what I’m actually going to be turning in in a couple of weeks. And that’s a thing we always go through when we set up something as a pitch. It’s like it’s great that we were able to set it up as a pitch, but everyone is expecting something a little bit different. And so when I do turn in this script they’re going to have opinions based on what their preconceptions of it were. And if had just been able to write the script and give it to them without all that pitch process it would have been a very different thing.

David: I do this weird thing. This I do in TV. I don’t think I can do it features. But almost every time I’ve pitched a TV show I’ve secretly written the script first. Or I’ve secretly written a good deal of it. And if you’re writing a half-hour script that is not a huge time constraint.

John: You could write a half-hour script probably faster than you could put together a pitch for it.

David: Without a doubt. And sometimes a 60-page one. And I think hearing the characters speak on the page, feeling what it feels like for them to interact, that gives you something when you walk into a room and describe what it is that you are doing in a way that just kind of blue-skying it, talking about what other movies it feels like, kind of telling a joke that might exist in it. It just doesn’t work the same way. I think that particularly if you write very character-driven things you kind of need to have the characters speak at least privately before you could ever describe it to somebody else.

John: So let’s talk about some of the writing, especially your action writing, because I’ve not had a chance to read your actual script, but Susanna your action sequences are fantastic. One of the things I was not expecting when I saw the movie last night was sort of how intensely sort of R-rated kind of action sequences they are. And so some of them are not with our leads. They’re with characters who are technically spies. But other scenes have to have our comedy leads also be part of those sequences.

What was it like writing those things together and then what was it like figuring out how you were going to direct those sequences which are so ambitious?

Susanna: Thank you, first of all. I’m glad you liked the brutality that we brought to the screen in today’s hyper-violent world. Dave and I had read a lot of – in preparation to write this – we had read a handful of action scripts. And there was a tone to the way that they were written, both in the action and just in the muscularity of the style that was – it was less kind of literary than we were used to. We’re both novelists, too, so we were used to writing these kind of beautiful on the page dramedies. And here we are reading these scripts that have like a lot of incomplete sentences and dash dashes and sounds and, you know, caps lock. And it just was not our style.

But there was an undeniable sort of like power to reading those. So we were like let’s just as an experiment try to mimic the style and see if we can kind of get into it. And we found it really fun, even though it was a completely different kind of style of writing.

And so we tried to sort of, yeah, I mean, I would say writing them was really fun because we found that we secretly loved that kind of aggressive style. It made us feel empowered. We kind of got an adrenaline rush from it. And we really just pushed ourselves to come up with action that felt situationally interesting or funny where there was like a comedic game to this scene, but then the scene itself played out in a pretty straightforward serious action way. And I think dissecting that partly happened on the page and then happened throughout the process of directing which I’ll get to in a second.

But it’s a little bit like, you’ve got these comedic scenes that feel somewhat grounded within the context of a spy movie. Friends interacting in a grounded way. And then you are kind of expecting people to sit through pretty violent sequences and then go back to a scene where Kate McKinnon is making them laugh about something banal. So in writing those action sequences it’s like you don’t want people to have whiplash reading or watching that from tone to tone and feel like they’re watching two different movies that don’t kind of meld well.

And so it’s about figuring out ways to put cleverness or wit into the action sequences, both on the page and in directing them so that people can feel a bit of distance from the violence in a way. They can have a smile on their face the way that they do in like a Bond action sequence where between his witty quips and the creativity of the scenes there’s usually something just fun about them that inoculates you from being aware of how many people are actually falling off cliffs and getting shot in the head. Not in my movie. That’s not a spoiler. In Bond movies.

But so I think it was partly on the page but then we were like what’s a funny way for this person to die.

John: The body count in your movie is really high.

Susanna: It’s really high.

John: What is the actual number? Have you counted up?

David: I did figure it out once. It is definitely–

John: Is it more than 20?

David: It’s more than 20. It’s probably 35.

Susanna: I think it was 35-ish. Yeah. And then the directing piece was just I think – it felt like a revision. You know, I wanted the action to feel really visceral and fun, so I brought on this incredible stunt coordinator and second unit director named Gary Powell who had done the Bond and Bourne movies.

John: Legendary.

Susanna: He’s amazing. His whole family is legendary. His brother. His dad. His wife. They’re all stunt people which is incredible. And Gary, you know, it kind of felt like another phase of writing. We’d sit there and it felt like for that process he was my cowriter and we would kind of just do a beat sheet. We’d look at what we had. We’d talk about it. And then it was just a dialogue like anything else. You know, he would pull out the toys or pitch different toys or things and oftentimes they were too brutal and they would crossover into that like this is disturbing and I’m not going to want to – I’m not having fun anymore level.

So, I don’t know, it was like constantly negotiating that with him. But we made a beat sheet together. We broke things down. And tried to just come up with – Dave and I would try to sort of come up with the sort of funny observational humor twist on whatever Gary would bring.

John: OK.

David: And I would have to have a cordial argument with Gary about if it’s possible to kill somebody with a salami. In which he said it wasn’t, but I was insisting we try.

Susanna: And I think Gary, too, has his own pet peeves. You know, the way that as writers there are probably things in movies that you see and you’re like I hate when they do that, or I hate this type of joke, or I hate when they have characters do XYZ thing. Gary has his own list of things coming from a completely different place. Like he hates zip lines. He’s like, “I hate them.” He got in a big argument with other people on the crew about whether or not to have a zip line. Those are just his things.

And the salami came down to the fact that it crossed over into broad for him, but also the technicality of it bothered him.

David: Yeah, he was talking about how salami is constructed and how the human body is constructed. And it was, you know, it was illuminating for sure.

John: So this beat sheet that you’re doing with Gary Powell, how much of that beat sheet makes it back into the script, or how much of it exists as a separate document of just like when we do this sequence this is the beat sheet for that sequence?

Susanna: I mean, we had a pretty fleshed out, pretty specific description of the action in the script. The thing that changes is that it’s like what you’re actually watching, you can kind of write around or glibly write through – I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, too – but you can kind of like breeze through something to make it a fun read and then when you’re actually making a shot list and going down to the props department and looking at the knives that are going to be used and the fake blood. And you’re actually looking at it in a really granular way, some things you realize are impossible or some things are too goofy. Like Gary would argue the salami. And Dave would argue the salami was not goofy, it was subtle.

David: My argument was subtle.

Susanna: But when you’re actually translating it, sometimes you just have to adjust. So it was pretty written out and what you see is pretty much what was there, but you have to make certain adjustments. Also, you know, there’s a big action sequence in an old Soviet gym that used to be in the script in an ice rink. And it wasn’t until we were scouting and we couldn’t find the right ice rink in the middle of rural Hungary that we changed it. But we kept seeing these gyms.

John: Great.

Susanna: So you kind of have to be flexible in that way. And then it was a combination of Dave and me kind of rewriting it and then Gary presenting the reality of what that would mean and what that will really look like and whether it will look goofy or not.

John: As people will see in the movie, one of the things I want to sort of key them into and be aware of is as we’re intercutting between some of the spy stuff at the beginning and sort of the real world stuff you’ve done some very clever but simple visual things to say like, OK, no, that scene really was supposed to come here before this moment. There’s a moment with a cue ball which exists on both sides of the cut. And these little small visual rhymes and sort of idea rhymes that let us know that like, no, these really are the same movie. You really are in the same space, the same universe. Nicely done I’m just saying.

Susanna: Oh, thank you.

David: Thank you. I mean, we talked a lot about, and I think this was Susanna as a director talking to us collectively as a writer is transitions were incredibly important. And I don’t know if that’s always a thing that I think about when I’m writing, and I’m sure she can speak more to it, but when you’re putting together shots and actually trying to direct things moving from one scene in a totally different place to another scene should feel like it has some sort of connective tissue.

So a lot of that was her coming back to me and to us when we were rewriting and challenging us to have these transitions which I’m glad you noticed.

Susanna: I know. Thank you.

John: Also, on the page classically the last line of a certain scene sort of informs the first line of the next scene, but when you’re dealing with action sequences there often are no lines and so it’s a matter of sort of visually finding a way to like just characters moving in the same direction, a prop, an idea, an image, you know, brightness/darkness. There’s ways you find to sort of match that.

And you won’t always be able to get those into the script. It won’t always make sense in the script. But you have to think as you move from writer-director you’re thinking, you know, visually how I’m going to signal that this really is supposed to be moving from this scene to this scene.

Susanna: Yeah. I mean, I’m working on something now as a director on a pilot that I didn’t write and getting ready to figure out how to shoot that. I’m working with the writer on that. And we’re talking about the transitions and looking at each one and kind of having conversations about “What is like an object, a prop, an image, a character moment? Like what do we want to be feeling as we enter a scene and seeing?” And if it’s not a visual transition, because you can’t find the neat tidy one that works, it’s got to have an idea to it in one way or another.

And the earlier you can think about that the more prepared you can be to actually like get all the departments’ hands on deck to like really make that feel very designed, which I think then just adds a level – it elevates the thing I think.

John: Something Aline Brosh McKenna often says is you have to remember that the screenwriter is the only person who has already seen the movie. And so in your case you’re two screenwriters so you both saw the movie, but do you think you saw the same movie? I mean, it may be hard because you’ve actually gone through production and seen so many cuts, but David do you think you saw the same movie originally that she saw?

David: I think we saw the same movie. I think where it became different, not different but where our ways of seeing it was different, was on set where as a director there were just a million other things that she needed to address and deal with and see and discuss and lenses or whatever directors do. And then for me my job was almost entirely just to hold the script inside my head. And I think we leaned on each other for being able to balance that out. But truly I think we saw the same movie and we continue to see the same movie, but on set the like minutia of script stuff and if you move one character here, cut this line, or cut this scene how that will change, you know, 15 dominoes ahead, that became what I had to focus most on.

Susanna: And that also includes an actor asking me a question or wanting to change something and me in the moment being like, “Yeah, yeah, OK, fine,” and then Dave coming over to me at crafty and being like, “Actually, if she changes that line this other thing is going to follow.” But just him being there which was something that as people who had worked in TV and also feeling like the depth of the partnership that we had it was really important for me that the be there the entire time on the set, which I know for features is not always the case.

I cannot imagine making the movie without him there. It always seemed unjust to me that you’d write something and you’re the one who has seen it in your head and then somebody kind of comes on with good intentions or bad intentions and just does whatever they want and you have no oversight. And it doesn’t always work as harmoniously between the writer and director. They don’t always have the shorthand and that ease. But to me I just can’t imagine doing it another way and I’m glad that I didn’t have to. So, I would encourage–

David: Me too.

Susanna: You know, for writer-directors or people that have writing partners or whatever, I just think the movie cohered so much better for having that unity. I wish that studios would encourage more of that, or accept that as the goal if they can possibly do it.

John: So, let’s talk about the actual production schedule. So, how much was shot in the states and how much was shot overseas? What was the split between how you made the movie?

David: A day and a half in LA, right?

Susanna: We had several, when you watch the end of the movie there’s like all of these Hungarian names and then there’s like an Atlanta unit, an LA second unit, another LA second unit. And there’s all of these names. But basically we intended to shoot the whole thing in Europe. We were based in Budapest. And then we had this one sort of one day older actor’s sort of cameo type role that it was just hard to get people to fly halfway around the world to do. So as production got closer and closer we just kind of decided to move it when we get back to LA and do some establishing shots and some plate shots for the driving sequences let’s just pick up that day. So we had that.

And then we had a couple other moments when there were things we had to do as a separate unit. Like we reshot one of the action sequences at the end just because in the edit we felt like this could be better and we had a little bit – they always have a reserve fund in case of emergency and we had that to use. And so we figured let’s just try to get this sequence up to the level of the other ones. And so we went to Atlanta for a few weeks and had four days of just Gary Powell and like action people and a giant trapeze. That was kind of the most fun shoot because the movie was already almost done. People were happy with it. Kate had seen it. Kate was excited about it, so she was so game to strap on the harness and go all the way up in the air and fly around and have a Cirque du Soleil moment.

John: A mad trapeze battle.

David: We did a Silverlake bar in Budapest. We did a LA sort of strip mall in a strip mall in Budapest.

Susanna: Which ironically was like I think they said that one of the designers had also designed the Spanish style malls in like Camarillo. And so there’s this Spanish style mall in Budapest.

John: I would never have guessed that that wasn’t LA. That was very convincing.

Susanna: Yeah. I mean it just exists there. And the only way you can tell that it’s definitely not LA is that the names of the stores are just a little bit wrong. Like my favorite one was Wall Street Fashion of the Wolf.

John: I remember there was that thing like that was a deliberate in joke that you put there.

Susanna: Oh yeah. Nope.

David: And the parking lot was full of every Prius that existed in central Europe.

Susanna: Of which there were about three.

David: About five of them, yeah.

John: So the movie comes out now. So what are your responsibilities with the film that’s coming out into the world? You’re on Scriptnotes which is of course the biggest platform–

Susanna: The zenith.

John: The zenith of it all.

David: Don’t be self-deprecating. This is a platform.

Susanna: But actually though.

John: But really?

David: Oh really.

John: So you have premieres coming up. You have other stuff. What does this next week look like for you?

Susanna: Well, the premiere is tomorrow, so it looks like–

David: When we recorded.

Susanna: Oh yes, sorry. The premiere is on the 25th. I don’t know. I mean, it’s a combination of really banal stresses like is my mom going to be able to find her seat at the premiere combined with having to go to the Four Seasons and put makeup on which is not my comfort zone and get my picture taken, also not my comfort zone, for this piece they’re doing on Mila, Kate, and me, and women doing stuff.

So, yeah, it’s a combination of talking about the movie a lot to a lot of really intelligent people who I really love talking to about it. But it’s, you know, I hope I’m saying the right things and I’m always a little paranoid that I’ll say something that can be taken out of context. So a little of that anxiety combined with just like the neurosis of getting a dress to wear and stuff. So, yeah. So that. I don’t know if that answers the question but yeah.

John: David have you picked your dress? Is it all about the dress?

David: I mean, the suit that I got for the premiere is quite a feat. Hopefully by the time this posts you can look for that in Getty Images.

John: You’ll find links in the show notes.

David: You’ll find links in the show notes to my suit which I put a lot of thought into. It has owls on it. And for me the week is dealing with my parents and my sisters and my brother-in-law are all coming out for the premiere. And then it is doing searches for the movies when I shouldn’t.

John: Absolutely. Just seeing what everyone is saying about it.

David: Exactly.

Susanna: We have a plan is which like the day that the review embargo is lifted. Our plan is just to meet at the Lion Hotel where we wrote the script and just sit there probably disengaged from each other, like refreshing the Internet all day and like probably drinking eight cappuccinos.

David: Crying over them.

John: Celebrating the good ones and despairing over the bad ones.

Susanna: Yes, celebrating the good ones.

David: Crying a little bit about the bad ones.

Susanna: I mean, no review could be worse than the very first review that my first movie got which was – I won’t go into incriminating detail but it was an absolute blood bath. And nothing could be worse than that.

David: We’ll see. Fingers crossed.

Susanna: Nothing could be worse than that, but in a moment of poetic justice a subsequent article about that reviewer revealed that he is now in prison for some sort of a child porn thing.

John: Oh man.

Susanna: Which like you never really get – I don’t want to say you never get that satisfaction because I’m sorry for the victims. But, he got what he deserved.

David: Remember when Susanna said that she was worried that she would say something that could be taken out of context?

John: Absolutely. That’s going to be the next the She-Hulk controversy on this is you saying something controversial about a reviewer and sexual misconduct.

Susanna: He’s not going to be reading or listening to this podcast, because he is in jail.

John: That’s good. Susanna, you’re headed off to shoot a pilot next. And how many days is a pilot? Is a pilot like a 20-day thing? I don’t have a sense of what pilots are these days.

Susanna: It varies. This is an hour-long pilot. We’re shooting on location in New Zealand.

John: Oh lord.

Susanna: Which I’m excited about. I love shooting around the world. I never did the traveling thing in my early 20s. I just was here working, you know, bad receptionist jobs and trying to be a screenwriter so now it’s my chance.

The pilot shoot is somewhere around 15 days. Yeah.

John: And David what are you up to next?

David: Well, Susanna and I are writing another thing, another couple things together, but while she is shooting I have a script that I wrote that I would like to direct that I’m starting to send out into the world. A Mars-set dramedy. And I have a teen time travel script that I’m sending out into the world. I have things that I love that hit my very, very specific sweet spot.

But I’m also excited for the thing – our follow up things that Susanna and I are working on.

John: Also we should plug books while we’re here, because I just bought both of your books while I was reading your stuff coming over here. What prompted you to write the book and how is your actual experience with the book? Because I’ve enjoyed – I’m writing a series of three books and I’ve enjoyed it but also, man, it’s a lot of words. It’s a very different world than what we normally do.

David: What prompted me was a similar prompt for us writing this movie. It’s that I was working in TV for a while and I had worked on great shows and I did things I was incredibly proud of but I felt like I just didn’t have anything that felt like it was mine that I could say slide something across a table and say this is a thing and it exists in the world.

And I had this character, sort of acerbic 17-year-old teen named Astrid Krieger, the book is called Firecracker. It’s a young adult book. And she just sort of existed in my brain for a long time. And I have a problem as a writer, I have a hard time letting go of things. So I started writing her as a character in a pilot and then a series of short stories and then a feature and then I was like none of it quite felt right. And I wanted to give her a longer treatment. And so then I wrote this novel. And it takes incredible amount of time and effort to write a book, as you know, and the financial rewards are few unless you are like a rare unicorn in there. But it’s worth it because it’s a thing that I love and it’s out in the world.

John: Great. And Susanna your book Nuclear Family, is that while you were in New York for Imagine?

Susanna: Well I had been working on this other project, this movie that I had thought was about to get made and it kind of fell apart at the last minute. And so I decided that – I kind of got into that like post-breakup space where I was like, “OK, I have to have the rebound script right now,” which is the burst of energy that led to Spy. And then my goal was just to leave and travel far, far away from here and just forget about the industry and my broken dreams.

So I went to New York to finish this book that I owed pages on. I had sold a proposal for this book based on some short comedic pieces that I was writing about my family for The New Yorker. And then just decided to go to New York and be around book people for a while and finish the book, which ironically led me to meet the person who produced the movie.

But just one thing I wanted to say about the book that I wrote was that in a moment of, or in a five-month moment of writer’s block after my show ended, I just wasn’t sure what to write. I was feeling really frustrated. I felt like I was right back to the beginning again. I was in the same coffee shop surrounded by frustrated writers. And I decided to set like a very small goal of just writing a one-page basically monologue, just to try to submit to like the McSweeney’s short imagined monologues, just to try to have a thing that I generated that I could send out that wasn’t like an entire script of 100 pages.

And so I have a younger half-brother who at the time was six years old and he’s very formal. He wears blazers and puts truffle oil on his food. And I wanted to write something in his voice because it was so specific. I’ve always wanted to write about people in my family that are that specific but felt like it’s either a really affected quirk in an indie movie. It’s like too broad to be real. So the only format that seemed to work was this weird monologue format, which I was comfortable with because of all the dialogue writing that I’d done in scripts.

And so that led to writing a few more letters which led to the book. It wasn’t like I thought I was going to write a book. It just was something that felt easier to do than writing a script at the time. I think like sometimes the story tells you what it wants to be.

John: Definitely.

Susanna: And I think just to circle back to your initial question about why a movie and not TV, there’s just certain stories that I think in the vein of a Greek tragedy like they just don’t want to be extended that long. There’s an arc and there’s a finiteness to the storytelling and a discreteness to it that requires that the beginning, middle, and end happen kind of like right in front of your eyes. So I think that some things feel like they could just go on, and on, and on, and others start to lose the thread.

So, in a way coming up with stories, you have to kind of follow what it’s telling you it wants to be. I don’t know if you’ve had the same experience.

John: Oh absolutely. And that’s why Arlo Finch is a book rather than a movie. And there’s ideas which I’ve written as TV versus films because they want to sort of keep going, versus in movies it’s meant to be a two-hour experience. You’re in, you’re out, and you’re done.

Congratulations on your film.

David: Thank you.

Susanna: Thank you. Thanks so much.

John: So this is the part of Scriptnotes where we do our One Cool Things. You guys were warned about this. Do you have One Cool Things?

David: Yeah. Sure.

John: David first.

David: OK, this is not a new book, but this is a book that I pick up from time to time and I recommend from time to time which I think is very pertinent to our industry, but not about our industry at all, called Banvard’s Folly by Paul Collins. It came out probably 18 years ago. And it’s sort of chapter long sketches of people’s lives who are incredibly famous in their own time and then forgotten completely to history. And it’s just a really fun, fascinating, easy to read book. It’s not available on audio books, so I think you have to read it like a person, which I hate recommending to people. But otherwise it’s great.

Susanna: I am obsessed with this book American Kingpin which is the story of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road. This book reads like the most compelling long form journalism article in Rolling Stone ever. And it just takes a look at all of the sides of this guy and all of the people in his life and sort of the more banal parts of his life that you don’t hear about in articles that are about him getting busted for Silk Road. So, you know, the women he had relationships with. The family. The people he was lying to. Their sides of the story. It’s just great. I mean, it’s such an interesting human lens on this person that I find to be incredibly fascinating. Dave recommended it to me actually.

David: Yeah. It’s great. I love it.

John: Nice. My One Cool Thing is Natalie Walker’s Twitter Auditions.

David: Oh yes.

John: So Natalie Walker is an actress comedian in New York City. But what I love about the auditions she posts in her Twitter feed, they’re for character roles that aren’t like real roles, but then you recognize what she’s doing. It’s like, oh my god, that is such an archetype of a character who I have never seen really fleshed out that way, or really sort of explored that way. So, I will read you a couple of descriptions.

“Here is my audition to be in a movie as lady we hate because she is temporarily keeping the people with symmetrical faces from being together.” So basically she’s that hateful character in a romantic comedy who the guy is dating. It’s fantastic.

“Here is my audition to be the lady who shakes vaguely dissatisfied white men out of malaise with her accessible eccentricity and views.” So she’s that one who just exists to make the male character a little looser. So they’re all ingenious. I highly recommend them.

Sometimes you will see one of these characters and you will realize like, oh, I can’t write that character anymore because she’s totally called me out on it.

David: She definitely has our number for sure.

John: There’s a character on Saturday Night Live in the monologues sometimes who is the boxer’s wife in a movie. I don’t know if you’ve seen this character. It’s just a brilliant characterization of what it’s like to be the wife character in a movie about boxing. And once you see it like well that’s just – that is a thing there. So, it’s important for us to have people out there who are calling attention to these tropes and hopefully stopping them.

That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions for us to answer, long ones.

But short questions on Twitter are easy. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Are you guys on Twitter? Do you want to be on Twitter?

David: Yes. I’m @davidiserson.

Susanna: I’m @susannafogel.

John: After you see their movie you should tweet at them and tell them how much you enjoyed it. Or buy their books and tell them how much you enjoyed their books.

You can find Scriptnotes on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a review. That helps.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all the back episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you can find the photo of David’s tuxedo, or not a tuxedo. What you are wearing to this premiere? It’s a suit, correct?

David: It’s a suit. It’ll be a suit.

John: I don’t want to overbill it, but you should check out what he’s wearing to this premiere.

David: You may be under-billing it.

John: All right. It’s also where you can find the transcripts for the show. You can find the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net. It’s $2 a month for access to the whole back catalog. We also sell seasons for $5. You can download a 50-episode season that has all the bonus episodes and transcripts as well. So, David, Susanna, congratulations on your movie. Thank you for coming on Scriptnotes.

David: Oh, it’s our pleasure. This is dream come true.

Susanna: Thank you for having us. This has been awesome.

Links:

• Thanks to Susanna Fogel and David Iserson for joining us! The Spy Who Dumped Me is in theaters now.
• David’s much-anticipated premiere suit
• Banvard’s Folly by Paul Collins
• American Kingpin by Nick Bilton
• Natalie Walker’s Twitter Auditions
• Also, as promised in episode 357, this is Craig’s fancy corkboard!
• The USB drives!
• David Iserson on Twitter
• Susanna Fogel on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/relationships).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Yes. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 360 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to be talking about relationships and how writers let the reader know what’s going on between two or three or more characters in a scene. Then we’ll be looking at three new Three Page Challenges to see how these suggestions might help.

**Craig:** You said this is Episode 360?

**John:** Yep. Gone full circle.

**Craig:** Wow. We have gone full circle. And in five days we will also have a year, five days, five weeks. We will have a year of podcasts.

**John:** Yeah. The math doesn’t really kind of work the same way. Well, I guess, I think if you count the bonus episodes you could listen to an episode a day and fill a full year.

**Craig:** Right. Except the leap year.

**John:** Yeah. We don’t really count those.

**Craig:** No, we don’t count those.

**John:** But looking at calendars, I do have some things to put on your calendar for listeners.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Yes. I have a couple of Arlo Finch things coming up. August 25 I’ll be at the San Diego Festival of Books, talking about Arlo Finch and signing some Arlo Finches. September 22 I will be at the Orange Public Library Comic-Con. So there’s Comic-Cons in other places. So this is the City of Orange. And then the start of October I am headed to Frankfurt, Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen for the German and Scandinavian releases of Arlo Finch.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** So if you are in any of those cities or countries you can track me down.

**Craig:** That’s awesome. I kept meaning to get up to Stockholm at the very least because Lithuania, we’re right up there, you know. We’re right there.

**John:** Stockholm is amazing.

**Craig:** So like our director Johan Renck and our DP, Jakob Ihre, and then Stellan Skarsgård, they just zip back and forth as they need to. It’s easy for them to go home. It’s not so easy for me to go home when I’m there. But, yeah, so I want to go to Stockholm and Oslo would be pretty great, too. And Copenhagen. I mean, actually they all would be pretty great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, you’ll have a great time doing that. And just out of curiosity when you are on tour promoting Arlo Finch do you try and shorthand it to ArFi? Do you do ArFi? ArFi?

**John:** Sorry about that loud bang.

**Craig:** Did you just shoot yourself?

**John:** I did. I shot myself.

**Craig:** That question was so horrifying to you that you just – that would have been the most amazing way to end this podcast.

**John:** Boom!

**Craig:** Yeah. John? John? John?

**John:** Episode 360.

**Craig:** John?

**John:** I never shorten it down to ArFi. He’s Arlo Finch in every market. That’s the only thing that hasn’t changed. So in France they changed the subtitle of the book to Le Mystere des Longs Bois. But otherwise it’s just Arlo Finch, something about Valley of Fire.

**Craig:** That French cover for the new book is great.

**John:** Yeah, it’s cool.

**Craig:** Love that cover.

**John:** And you and I will be together doing live shows in the Austin Film Festival. So that is October 25 that that starts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And while I’m there that’s actually coincidentally the Texas Book Festival, so I’ll be doing events both for Texas Book Festival and Austin Film Festival at the same time.

**Craig:** Can we call the Austin Film Festival AuFi?

**John:** Yes. We can. We will officially change it to AuFi.

**Craig:** We are going to have a great Austin show this year. Some awesome people are going to be coming. We’re going to pack the stage as we usually do. And we’ve been talking to the Austin folks and I think it’s going to be pretty exciting. And I did not realize this but apparently the live show, they had to turn people away. So, we’re working on maybe a way that we don’t have to turn people away.

**John:** A bigger venue would be a great thing. So we’ll see if we can get that to happen.

**Craig:** Correct. Oh, and I should mention to those of you who are thinking about going to Austin Film Festival to participate in the pitch competition.

Apparently there was a little bit of I guess some feedback that the judges last year may have been altogether a little too easy on the contestants. And apparently the request came in that I return to provide a little bit of, I don’t know, a little more of that Simon Cowell je ne sais quoi. So I believe I will be judging the final pitch competition at Austin this year. So, you know, you want to do that, right? You want to be in that. So be in it.

**John:** Be in it.

**Craig:** Be in it.

**John:** Do it. Do it.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** Do it. Our episode this week is about relationships and Lawant on Twitter actually asked, “I started going through the podcast from episode number one. Do you guys happen to know if there’s an episode going into how you two met?”

And so I was thinking back and in Episode 100 we do talk about the emails that led to the creation of the podcast, but I’m not sure we’ve ever discussed on the show sort of how you and I met, sort of that backstory thing. And I think I have one memory of it, but you may have a different memory of it. So, my memory of it is that you were starting Artful Writer, your blog, and you reached out through David Kramer, my agent, who was also your agent at the time to see if we could get on the phone to talk about setting up the blog. Is that your first instinct of how we met?

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. I remember thinking that there were certain technical things. I noticed, I believe, that you were using – were you using Word Press for your site or were you using Movable Type? Remember Movable Type?

**John:** Yeah. I remember Movable Type. Movable Type is I think entirely Pearl-based, and it generated static pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. It roamed the earth once, like the dinosaurs. And has gone the way of the dinosaurs as far as I can tell.

**John:** I’m still on Word Press now, but I think I might have been on Movable Type at that point. I remember you asking a very specific question about my little brad logo and how it floated over–

**Craig:** Yes! You know what it was? I remember, so I had started up this Movable Type blog and I had just a general design, but then there were certain things I was doing to customize it. And I looked at your site and like how the hell – there’s got to be some simple, easy plug-in or something he’s done to make this logo like this. I remember talking to you and you were like, “No, that took hours,” somehow like trimming around the brad and coding it in to float and all the rest. And then I realized that I just didn’t want to spend hours.

But I think that was the first time I ever spoke with you about anything. It was just computer stuff. It wasn’t writing stuff.

**John:** No, it wasn’t at all. And then I think the first time I remember actually meeting you was at Huntington Gardens. You were there with your family. I was there with my family.

**Craig:** That was the first time?

**John:** I think. We may have met in person one time before then, but I just remember it was really weird and random that we were at the same gardens in Pasadena at the same time. And I’d only been there like twice or three times in my life, so it was a rare overlap.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember bumping into you there. So that was a long time. But we were just, you know, not friends or anything, we just knew each other and so forth. But then we got involved in this little boondoggle we invented for Fox, but how did that start?

**John:** I think you probably called me about that, because you’d already started talking with other writers. So, for folks who don’t remember, no one would remember this history, Craig had this idea of trying to make a deal at one of the studios for a small group of writers to get real meaningful backend on their projects. And so he pitched it to me. I said it sounded like a great idea. We brought in a bunch of other writers. Craig and I went and pitched it to a bunch of studios. Fox bought into the idea. And very little actually became of it ultimately.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was an interesting thing. I remember specifically the genesis of it was I read about what they had done at Warner Bros. John Wells had put a group together at Warner Bros. And so I called John up and said, “Hey, describe this whole thing.” And he did. And it sounded like a pretty good deal. So then I was like well why don’t we do this. And the problem is I think they all went the same way. They all, every version of this has never gone well, whether it was through Sony or Warner Bros. or Fox. I think those are the three places that have done them. It just ultimately never really works. McQuarrie did one like this as well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Nothing ever comes of them.

**John:** And I don’t know if we can say definitively why. But I will say one of the challenges is that studio leadership keeps changing, and so it becomes hard to sort of kind of not really even force the deal but sort of like keep the deal active and going when leadership keeps changing.

**Craig:** It does. And it was I think problematic in part because it required the material to come from the writer. And as we were putting these deals in place the studios’ interest in material they didn’t control kept plummeting. So ultimately you couldn’t really apply a deal like this to any project that relied on underlying property. And, well, that turned out to be essentially all they ever wanted to make.

So that was – there were a bunch of reasons why it began. I think another factor in that is just simply that the writers who qualified for consideration for these kinds of things were so freaking busy and never had a day off, ever. And somebody had always lined up some other thing with them that there was very little time for them to do the sort of work that would lead to success with one of these things.

So, all sorts of reasons why that didn’t work. But you and I went around. I think that was really when we got to know each other. Because we were kind of rowing together in a little canoe. And we made a great little team, I thought.

**John:** Yeah. I thought so, too. And so when we first started doing the podcast I remember there was some episode early on where I said like, “Well it’s not like you and I are friends outside of this podcast,” and you were really offended by it. And I remember I was like, oh, I hurt Craig’s feelings. And Craig has feelings. And we’ve become much better friends over the course of doing the podcast, but also–

**Craig:** Do I have feelings? I guess I do.

**John:** You do have feelings.

**Craig:** I guess I do.

**John:** But we weren’t playing D&D at the start. Like all that stuff came.

**Craig:** No, we have become friends through this podcast. I mean, whether I was legitimately hurt or not. You had a fair point. We weren’t really that close or anything. But our relationship is a function of the work that we do together. That’s how it’s happened. And that’s by the way how relationships must happen, if I may Segue Man myself into our main topic–

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Relationships have to be functional. I think sometimes people make a mistake and they think a relationship is just two people who like to chat together or sleep together. That in and of itself is not enough function.

**John:** Yeah. So in framing this conversation about relationships, I think there’s two challenges screenwriters face.

One is how you get the audience up to speed on relationships that began before the movie started. And so this is trying to figure out like literally letting the audience know how these two people are related. Are they siblings? Are they friends? Are they a couple? Are they ex-spouses? Getting a sense of what are the underlying conflicts that started before the movie started. And really who wants what. That’s all stuff that you as the writer hopefully know and you have to find ways to expose to the audience if it’s going to be meaningful to your story.

The second challenge screenwriters face is how do you describe the changes happening in a relationship while the movie is going on. And so it’s really the scene work. What is the nature of the conflicts within the scene? How are we showing both characters’ points of view? What is the dialogue that’s exposing their inner life and exposing the nature of their relationship?

And they’re very related things but they’re not the same things. So what Craig and I just described in terms of our backstory, that’s kind of the first part is setting up the history of who we are. But so much of the writer’s work now is to figure out how within these scenes are we moving those relationships forward and providing new things to study.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s exactly right. The screenwriter has certain tasks that are homeworky kind of tasks. You do need convey information. We have this wonderful opportunity when a movie begins to have fun with that. The audience is engaged. They’re leaning forward in their seat. They haven’t yet decided that this movie stinks. So, you can have fun and tease along or misdirect what relationships are. And then reveal them in exciting and fun ways. And that’s I think really enjoyable for people.

So there’s an opportunity to maybe have – maybe it doesn’t have to be quite busy work when we’re establishing how people relate to each other factually. But the real meat of it, as the story progresses, is that fabulous space in between two or three people. The relationship I generally think of as another character. There’s what I imagine this person like alone. There’s what I imagine this person like alone. But when they’re together there’s that other thing between them. And if you think that sounds a little foofy, well, just consider the word chemistry and how often we use it to apply to actors who must perform these relationships. Because when it’s there what do we describe it as? Sparks, or whatever. It’s that thing in between.

And when it’s not there, there’s nothing.

**John:** Yeah. Chemistry is fundamentally the mixture of two elements that by themselves would be relatively stable. And you put them together and they create something new. And that’s what we’re really talking about in a relationship is that new thing that is created when those characters are interacting and challenging each other.

So, let’s talk about establishing these characters and I think you’re right to describe at the beginning of the movie the audience does lean in because I think partly they’re trying to figure out who these people are and sort of what slots to put them in. People approach movies with a set of expectations and there are certain kind of slots that they want people to fall into. And they’re looking for like, OK, well what slot are they falling into? And if you are aware of what the audience’s expectations are that can be really helpful.

So, some of the slots people are looking for is, well, who is the hero, the protagonist? Who is the love interest? Who is the best friend? Who is the rival? Who is the mentor? Who is the parent? That’s not to say you should have stock characters, but it’s to be aware that the audience is looking for a place to put those folks essentially. A sense of the relationship geography of the central character and the people around them.

And so be aware that the audience is trying to find those things and help them when you can. And if you need to defeat those expectations or change those expectations be aware that’s a job you’re assigning yourself.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That you have to make sure that the audience understands this isn’t quite what you think. You think that this person is the father, but he’s actually a step-father who has only been married to the mother for a year. If that’s important, you’re going to have to get that out there quickly so we understand.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And similarly there are times when just like you and the audience, one of the characters onscreen will also not quite understand the nature of the relationship, and so it’s important then to tie back to our perspective and point of view episode. If I’m in the perspective and point of view of somebody who has a basic understanding of what a relationship is, and if I want to subvert that I first must lay the groundwork for their wrong understanding. And create their expectation.

So, in Training Day, we have an understanding because we share a perspective with Ethan Hawke that he’s been assigned the kind of badass older veteran character who is going to train him and be his mentor. And so that’s his understanding. And then the guy just starts doing some things that are a little uh, and he goes eh, OK, and we’re all a little bit like uh. And then it gets much, much, much, much worse. And we understand that we, like Ethan Hawke, completely misunderstood the nature of this relationship. And then a different relationship begins to evolve.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s talk about some of these expectations. So Ethan Hawke had a set of expectations going into it. I think so often as I read through Three Page Challenges or moments in scripts that aren’t really working I feel sometimes the screenwriter is trying to do a bunch of work to explain something that could have just been done visually. And so they’re putting a lot of work into describing something that could be done as sort of a snapshot, as an image.

So, I want to give a couple snapshots of things you might see in a movie and as an audience you see these things and you’re like, OK, I get what’s going on here, so all of that work is being done visually and therefore the dialogue can just be about what’s interesting and new and is not establishing these relationships.

So, here’s the first snapshot. You see four people seated at a table in an airport restaurant. They’re all African American. There’s a woman who is 35 and putting in eye drops. There’s a man who is 40, a little overweight, who is trying to get a six-year-old boy to stay in his seat. There’s a girl who is nine and playing a game on her phone.

So, you see these four people around a table, you’re like, OK, they are a family. They’re traveling someplace. That’s the mom. That’s the dad. Those are the kids. That’s your default assumption based on the visual I described. So therefore anything you want to do beyond that, or if you need to clarify exactly the nature of these relationships between people, that there’s like a step relationship or one is actually a cousin, you can do that but that visual sort of gave you all that stuff for free. And so therefore you can spend your time in dialogue on doing interesting things with those characters rather than establishing that they’re actually a family and they’re traveling someplace.

**Craig:** Yeah. You suddenly don’t need to do things like have a character say, “Mom, or “Son,” or any of those annoying things that people do to hit us over the head with this sort of thing. But you’ve put some thought into how to create a relationship in a realistic way.

The fact of the matter is that many writers who struggle with this only struggle with it when they’re writing. If I take any of those people and bring them to an airport and walk them through the airport and just say you quietly look around and then describe to me the relationships you infer from what you see, they’ll get it almost all right.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** That’s how it works as humans. Therefore that’s what we need to do when we’re writing. I wish that writers would spend more time in their visual minds, I guess, rather than trying to just begin or stop with words, if they could maybe walk through the space in their heads and experience it. It’s amazing what you see when you do that. And then you don’t have to use dialogue.

**John:** Yeah. All right, so here’s another snapshot. So, next table over there’s a man and a woman. They’re sitting across from each other. They’re both early 30s in business suits. He’s white. She’s American-born Chinese. He wears a wedding ring which we see as he drinks his scotch. His eyes are red and puffy, maybe from crying. She doesn’t look at him. All her attention focused on the spreadsheet open on her laptop. So that’s the visual we’re giving to an audience at the very start.

We know there’s a conflict there. We know that something has happened. Something is going on. The nature of their relationship between each other is probably fraught. There’s something big happening there. And I think we’re leaning in to see what is the first thing that somebody says. What just happened that got them to this place?

Are they having an affair? Are they business colleagues? Something big has happened there. And you have a little bit of an understanding about their jobs, or sort of that it’s some sort of work travel. So that visual gives us a sense of who those two people are before we’ve had any words spoken.

Again, if you saw those people at the airport you would probably get that basic nature of their relationship and you’d be curious. And so I think the thing about sort of establishing people visually is that you want there to still be curiosity. You’re not trying to answer all the questions. You’re just trying to give a framework so that people are asking interesting questions about these characters in front of them.

**Craig:** You’re building a mystery. Right? You’re giving us clues. I have clues here. OK, these are the clues you’ve given me and I’m looking at the situation here. OK, I’ve got this man, I’ve got this woman. He’s wearing a wedding ring. He’s drinking scotch. He’s crying. He’s sad. She doesn’t seem sad at all. That’s a huge clue to me. Whatever he’s crying about, it’s not about her, because she’s looking at a spreadsheet. It’s not that she’s looking down nervously and shutting him down. She’s busy. She’s looking at a spreadsheet. This guy seems pathetic. I’m guessing his marriage has blown up and he’s crying about it for the 15th time to his associate who is subordinate to him therefore can’t tell him to shut the hell up.

She meanwhile is trying to get the work done that they need to get done so they both don’t get fired by the boss above both of them. I don’t know if that’s true. And I don’t know if you even thought it through that far.

**John:** I haven’t.

**Craig:** Right. It’s just that’s the bunch of clues there. And that’s how fast we start to assemble clues. Here’s the good news for all of you at home. What I just did is something that you can use to your advantage if you want people to get what you want them to get. It’s also what you can use to your advantage if you want people to assume something that is incorrect.

For instance, in the first scenario we see a man, a woman, two kids, they’re all sitting together in the airport, playing on a game. They’re all the same race. They all therefore technically can be related. It feels like a family. And that’s a situation where at some point you could have the nine-year-old, turn, wait, see somebody pass by and then hand 50 bucks to the man and the woman and say, “Thanks. We weren’t here.” And then she takes the six-year-old and they move along, right?

Like what the hell? Who is this little spy? But that’s the point. By giving people clues we know reliably we can get them to sort of start to think in a way. We are doing what magicians do. It’s not magic. It’s misdirection and it’s either purposeful direction or purposeful misdirection. This is the way we have fun.

**John:** Absolutely. And so the example you gave where they pay the money and leave, it would be very hard to establish the normalcy if you actually had to have characters having dialogue before that. We would be confused. And so by giving it to us just as a visual, like OK we get the reason why everyone around them would just assume they’re a family. But if we had to try to do that with dialogue or have somebody comment on that family, it would have been forced. It would have felt weird.

So, you have to think about sort of like what do you want the audience to know. What do you think the audience will expect based on the image that you’re presenting and how can you use that to your advantage?

Most times you want to give the audience kind of what they’re expecting so the audience feels smart. So they feel like they can trust their instincts. They can trust you as a storyteller. And maybe one time out of five defeat that expectation or sort of surpass that expectation. Give them a surprise. But you don’t want to surprise them constantly because then they won’t know what to be focusing on.

**Craig:** Right. Then they start to feel like this really is a magic show and they lose the emotional connection to things. So, in the beginning of something you can have fun with the details of a relationship because those are somewhat logical. And you can mess around with that. The more you do it, the more your movie just becomes a bit of a puzzle. And, by the way, that’s how whodunits work. But those are really advertising nothing more than puzzles. And that’s why I recommend all screenwriters spend time reading Agatha Christie. Just pick a sampling of two Poirots and two Marples. And just see how she does it. And see how clever she is. And see how much logical insight and brilliance is involved in designing these things, particularly in such a fashion where it works even though you are trying to figure it out while it’s happening.

**John:** Yeah. And so it’s not like those characters are realistic, but those characters are created in a very specific way to do a very specific function. And they have to be believable in doing their function the first time through and then when we actually have all the reveals you see like, OK, that’s what they really were doing. And I can understand why everybody else around them had made the wrong assumptions.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the beauty of it is that you start to realize by reading those whodunits how much stuff you’re filling in that isn’t there. You make these assumptions that that girl must be that woman’s daughter. That’s just a flat assumption you made and at no point was that ever stated clearly and why would you believe that? So, it teaches you all the ways that our minds work in a sense. So, that’s always great. But I think once you get past the technicals of portraying and conveying relationships, then the real magic and the real fun is in watching two people change each other through the act of being together, whether it is by talking, or not talking, or fighting, or regret. Whatever it is, that’s why I think we actually go to see these stories.

I don’t think we go to movies for plots. I think maybe we show up because the plot sounds exciting. We stay in our seat for the relationships. Lindsay Doran has an amazing talk about – did we – that’s going to be my One Cool Thing this week for sure. I mean, I’m sure I’ve said it before, but Lindsay Doran has a Ted Talk she’s done. It’s available online for free. That goes to the very heart of why relationships are what we demand from the stories we see.

**John:** Yeah. And too often you think about like is this a character moment or is this a story moment. And, of course, there is no difference.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have to make sure that the character moments are married into fundamental aspects of story that are moving the story forward. Because if you have a moment that is just like two character having a witty conversation but it doesn’t have anything to do with the actual forward trajectory of the plot, it’s not going to last. And if you have a moment that just moves the plot forward but doesn’t actually have our characters engaging and interacting and changing and their relationship evolving, it’s not going to be a rewarding scene either. So, moments have to do these two things at the same time. And that’s the challenge of screenwriting. It’s that everything has to do multiple things at once.

**Craig:** That’s why they’re doing them, right? I mean, the whole point is you’re in charge. You can make anything happen. You can end the movie right now if you want. So, why is this happening? And if your answer is, well, it’s happening because I need it to happen so that something else happens, no. No. Stop. Go backwards. You’re in a bad spot.

**John:** So often I think we have an expectation of what the trajectory are going to be for these characters also. Because we’ve seen movies before, so we know that the hero and love interest will have a fight at some point. They will break up. They’ll get back together. We can see some of these things happening. And that doesn’t mean you have to avoid all those things happening but you have to avoid all those things happening but you have to be aware that the audience sees it coming. And so if the audience sees it coming and kind of feels that you’re doing that beat just because you’re doing that beat, like, oh, now they’re going to break up because of this misunderstanding and, ugh, I saw that happening way ahead of time, that’s not going to be rewarding.

They’re going to have an expectation that attractive people will fall in love. That families will fight and splinter but ultimately come back together. So, all that stuff is sort of baked into our expectation of these stories from the start. So, be aware of that and so if you get to those moments understand what the stock version of that moment is and figure out how you push past that. How do you get to a new moment between these two very specific characters, not the generic archetypes of these characters? What is it about them that makes this scene, these two people being in the scene, so unique and special?

And when you see those things happen, that’s what makes your movie not every other movie.

**Craig:** It strikes me that nobody really talks about relationships when they’re doing their clunky, boring screenwriting classes and lectures. I mean, I’m sure some people out there do. But so often when I skim through these books they talk about characters and plot. They don’t talk about relationships. And I guess my point is I don’t care about character at all. I only care about relationship, which encompasses character. In short, it doesn’t matter what the character of Woody is until Buzz shows up.

**John:** Completely.

**Craig:** Woody, until Buzz shows up, is – well, his character I could neatly fit it on a very small index card. Woody is the guy who is in charge and has sort of a healthy ego because he knows he’s the chosen one. So he’s kind of the benevolent dictator. OK. Boring. Don’t care. That’s why movies happen. We don’t want that to keep on going. What we want is for Shrek to leave the swamp and meet Fiona. Then the characters become things that matter because there in – go back to our conflict episode. Everything is about relationship. They should only talk about plot and relationships as far as I’m concerned. We should just stop talking about character. It’s a thing that’s separate and apart.

I think a lot of studio executives make this mistake when they take about character arcs. I hate talking about character arcs. The only arcs I’m interested in are relationship arcs.

**John:** Yeah. Shrek is not a character, but Shrek and Donkey together is a thing. Like that’s–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s no way to expose what’s interesting about Shrek unless you have Donkey around to be annoying to him. So you have to have some thing or person to interact with. Yes, there are – of course, there exceptions. There are movies where one solo character is on a mission by him or herself and that’s the only thing you see. But those are real exceptions. And I agree with you that so many screenwriting books treat like, “Oh, this is the hero’s journey and this is the arc of the hero,” as if he or she is alone in the entire story. And they never are. And it’s always about the people around them and the challenges.

**Craig:** Or an animal.

**John:** Or an animal.

**Craig:** You know what I mean? There’s some relationship that mattes. And the only place I think you can kind of get away with learning and experiencing something from a character in the absence of a relationship in a kind of impressive way is in theater and on stage and through song, but in that sense you’re there with that person, the relationship is between – so when Shrek sings his wonderful song at the beginning of “A Big, Bright, Beautiful World,” the beginning of Shrek the Musical which as you know I’m obsessed with, he’s singing it to you in the audience. And you’re with him in a room. So that’s a different experience.

But on screen, then when you watch – OK, great example if I can get Broadway for a second, Fiddler on the Roof opens in the most bizarre way any musical has ever opened. The main character walks out and starts talking to you in the audience, immediately breaking the fourth wall. And he does it occasionally and then sometimes he talks to God. And he’s alone. And then there’s the song If I Were a Rich Man. He’s alone the entire time and he’s singing it to himself and to God, who is not visible.

And when you’re in a theater watching it it’s fun, and it’s great, and you get it. Then you watch the movie, which is not a bad movie at all. I like the Fiddler on the Roof movie, but when that song comes around you’re like what is happening.

**John:** Yeah. Who is he talking to?

**Craig:** Why is he? Who are you talking to? Why are you doing this? Why are you standing in a field singing? It’s bizarre. It doesn’t work in a movie. You need a relationship.

**John:** Yep. You do.

All right. Let’s take a look at the relationships in our Three Page Challenges. So, for folks who are knew to the podcast, every once and a while Craig and I take a look at the first three pages of people’s scripts, sometimes features, sometimes pilots. We’ve invited them to send these things in. These are not things we found online. These are not random things we’re criticizing. People have submitted these first three pages for us to look at.

So, Megan, the Scriptnotes producer, looks through them all and picks some that she thinks are going to be interesting for us to discuss. So if you want to read along with us the PDFs are going to be attached to the show notes, so go to johnaugust.com/shownotes. Look for this episode. And you can read along with us.

If you would like to submit your own Three Page Challenge you go to johnaugust.com/threepage and there’s rules for how you sort of put stuff in. So, again, not a competition. Not a contest. No one wins anything except hopefully listeners gain something from us talking about these brave people who have sent in their three pages.

**Craig:** Everybody wins.

**John:** Everybody wins. So, producer Megan McDonnell is actually going to read a summary of the things this time, so we will listen to a summary of the first script and then discuss. So the first script is Convenience by Jonathan Brown.

**Megan McDonnell:** Dee Brown and Sasha Thomas, both early 20s, avoid speaking as they shop in a convenience store. Sasha insists on undressing the unspoken issue. She’s your best friend. She can’t be so mad over some guy. Dee warns her that they’re being watched, but the cashier just reads a magazine. Sasha asks him to pick a side in their argument, but he stays out of it. Dee makes her purchase and exits. Sasha trails her out.

Sasha scolds Dee for being rude and immature saying it isn’t fair. Dee challenges her. What, that she’s not entertaining Sasha’s pity party or that she always has to be the one that pays at the register? Sasha admits that she didn’t notice whether or not there was someone else in the store. Of course she didn’t. She has a focus problem. They put on hoodies. Dee confirms that they are not friends anymore and she doesn’t care. She pulls out a gun. They put on masks and run back into the store.

**John:** Craig, talk me through Convenience.

**Craig:** OK. So, good summary by Megan. We have I think an interesting sort of scenario going on here. I understand that these – I assume that Dee is female. I believe Dee is female. So we have two women, two youngish women in their 20s, and they are both casing a joint. They’re shopping, arguing, and casing a joint and preparing to rob it, which feels like a very sort of Tarantino-y kind of thing. This reminds me of the opening of Pulp Fiction where Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer are having a chit chat in a diner and talking about hopes and dreams and then it ends with them announcing that they’re robbing the place. So that part is kind of cool.

The trouble I had with this ultimately is that it felt a bit rambly. There was a point in here. I think the point is that Sasha has done something to betray Dee. I think maybe stole a boyfriend or something, whose name is John.

**John:** John.

**Craig:** That’s a whole lot of words for what is somewhat mundane. And the relationship as we went through didn’t really change. In other words, it stayed on one level which is Sasha keeps yammering to try and get Dee to be OK with things. And Dee keeps pushing back and saying no. But it doesn’t get physical. It doesn’t get quiet. It doesn’t get stony. There’s no change in tactics which I always find troubling. I think in general people are very, very good at changing tactics when they’re trying to get something from somebody. There’s certainly plenty of conflict on display here which I think is a good thing.

Just technical things. There’s a few just odd bits in here. For instance, Sasha says, “You can’t seriously still be mad about it.” And then Dee says, “Seriously? We’re being watched.” So they’re using seriously twice but in different ways. They’re not necessarily echoing “seriously.”

Sasha says, “I’m your best friend. You can’t stop talking to me over some guy.” Nobody says that really like that. It’s a bit cliché. And I’m your best friend is just a weird thing. When we talked earlier about how to get across the specifics of a relationship, there are cooler ways to do that information than just somebody announcing it. We’re missing an apostrophe on “friend’s feelings.”

There’s a bit where they involve Bill who is the clerk in this convenience store. I assume he’s going to be important because he gets a name. The names are really generic. I don’t know quite what to do with these. Dee Brown. Sasha Thomas. Bill Frank. So I’m not sure where we are. I’d love to know also where are we in the world.

And lastly it appears that there’s some duplicated dialogue on page three where Dee says, “Look. I don’t care about John. I don’t care about you.” And then in the next line she starts, “Look. I don’t care about John. I don’t care about you.” I assume that’s not intentional. But a lot of this felt on the nose and exclamatory. And I think there’s a version of this where two people are whispering/arguing with each other in an aisle and we’re trying to suss out what they’re talking about but we can do a better job of uncorking that this is what they mean. And then one of them pulls out a gun and says “Just shut up until we’re done,” and then they rob the store.

I don’t know. It just felt very – this did not feel like an efficient use of the first three pages. What did you think, John?

**John:** I would agree with you there. So, talking about the relationship here, I think the reason why I didn’t understand the relationship well or didn’t click into the relationship is I don’t have any sense of who these two women are. I don’t – they’re just names. So, “Dee Brown, early 20s, and Sasha Thomas, early 20s, are walking through the convenient store aisles shopping.” That’s all we get for who these two women are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I don’t have any sense of who they are individually. I’m not given any bits of flavor to help me tell them apart. And so as I’m reading through the dialogue I had a really hard time remembering like, wait, no, who had the affair with who? I couldn’t tell them apart. And their voices are the same. So, there was really no way for me to click in on sort of what I should be looking for.

So, we talk about expectation. I didn’t really have any expectations for them because you’ve given me nothing to sort of grasp onto at the start here. Same with Bill Frank. “BILL FRANK, 20s, the cashier is flipping through his magazine.” Well, there’s a lot of cashiers and I don’t know what kind of person this is. So give me some flavor here so I have some sense of who this person is and what the nature of it is.

Specificity overall – I don’t know what kind of convenience store this is. I don’t know where we are. I don’t have a sense of the season. I don’t have a sense – just visually I’m given very little to grasp onto, so I’m just trying to listen to the dialogue and I can’t actually pull anything useful out of this other than Sasha did something bad. But I don’t know why we’re talking about it now.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And what is the inciting incident that got us to talk about this moment?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Well, it’s that the writer wanted to. And this is what I mean. Like, you got to come up with better reasons than this. By the way, I love what you just said about seasons. There is this fricking thing – am I aloud to say fricking without violating?

**John:** Absolutely. 100%.

**Craig:** Fricking thing where writers just – we talk about default white in screenplays. How about this? Default spring. Writers will write default spring. Because the second you actually get involved in production, somebody somewhere who has to dress these people will say when – what part of year is it? And most writers go, “Oh, uh, May.” No. May is boring. Give me the heat of summer. Give me the chill of winter. Come up with some cool stuff. And maybe if it is May it’s May, but then it’s hay fever. Whatever. Do something so that the weather matters. So that clothes are interesting. So every time the door opens there’s a wind that blows in and knocks a thing over. Use the world.

**John:** Use the world.

**Craig:** Use the world.

**John:** Other things that were just frustratingly unspecific to me, midway through page one, “Fiddles with items on the shelves. Dee continues to look around the convenience store and picks up an item to buy. Sasha follows her.” Picks up an item to buy. Got to pick up something. It’s no more words to actually say what that is that you’re buying. And anything would be more interesting than something to buy.

**Craig:** Anything. Anything. Like, somebody is stock piling the weirdest item. You know, like just ChapSticks. Just one after another after another after another. But whatever they’re doing everything has to be a choice. You’re absolutely right. And I think so much about what happened to these two girls with each other and their relationship could be helped along by just – is one tall and is one short?

**John:** Yeah. Give me something.

**Craig:** Punky haircut? Regular haircut? Give me something. It all felt incredibly bland and generic.

**John:** I had real geography problems when they left the store. And so I think what’s supposed to be happening is they’re basically doing a loop around the entire outside of the store and they’re coming back in front. But I had no real sense of where I was. So I couldn’t tell if they were still out front, where they were in terms of this. It makes sense to do the loop, but just give me the loop because I didn’t process it.

And I wasn’t ahead of the writer in terms of knowing this was going to be a stick up really. I mean, I assume they were shoplifting or something. So, I was a little excited by the, OK, now they’re going to rob and that’s the bottom of page three. But, I didn’t feel it.

And here’s the thing. If you’re going to do the reversal like, oh, they’re going to actually rob the place, the conversation leading up to that still has to be interesting. So, the thing we talked about with Pulp Fiction is like that conversation in the diner was fascinating.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**John:** Before they pulled the gun.

**Craig:** That’s why pulling the gun was such a shock. It’s not a shock here that they pull a gun because really what I get is two fairly bland, generic people are also doing a fairly bland, generic movie thing which is robbing a convenience with a bland weapon. It’s not even an interesting weapon. They haven’t even bought a can of bug spray and a lighter to use that as a flame torch. You know what I mean? It’s just, oh, here’s the usual gun. And I don’t know, it’s all just so…

One last little bit on that geography. I think sometimes if you want to do something that might be confusing to a reader then just use it to your advantage and say we’re not really sure where they’re going now and then, surprise, they’ve ended up right back at the front. Except this time they pull their heads down and pull out their – you know what I mean? Be impressionistic about it I guess.

**John:** Last little thing I will say is at the bottom of page three you commented how there’s dialogue that’s repeated. So it could be intentional. But if you’re going to repeat dialogue that way, because sometimes people do say the same thing again, give us something different in how you’re presenting it so that we know that it wasn’t a mistake.

So, the second time, like, “Listen, I don’t care about John.” Underline something. Uppercase some things to make it clear that this is not a mistake. She really is saying the same thing again, just with different emphasis, or really nailing it home.

**Craig:** Or even a parenthetical. Again. Just so that you’re letting the reader know, yeah, this is purposeful. I didn’t just screw up.

**John:** Final thing I will say is sometimes a character speaks and then there’s a line of action and the character speaks again with a continued. That can be a powerful thing, but I got confused a couple times here where I thought like we should have switched to the other character. If you’re going to do that, there has to be a real reason for why you interjected there. That there’s more happening after it. There were a lot of cases here where I felt like you should have just kept all that dialogue together and then done the action line, or put stuff in as a parenthetical because there’s a lot of cases of CONT’Ds and stuff that just confused me.

**Craig:** Yep. All right, well why don’t we move onto our second Three Page Challenge for this episode. It’s Plunder Cove by Paul Acampora and Erin Dionne. So let’s have Megan tell us a little bit about Plunder Cover.

**Megan:** A beat up car parks near a warn Plunder Cove amusement park billboard. Elliot Marker, 17, and Lilly, 9, gather their belongings from the car, her horse-shaped backpack and his hockey stick. He points out a small snake on the ground and warns Lilly to watch her step. Watching her step is the biggest part of staying safe.

Elliot pries open a hole in the chain link fence and props the gap for he and Lilly to climb through. He calls this their special family pass. They joyfully run through the amusement park and get caught by a guard just inside the wall. Elliot claims that they were just looking for a bathroom for Lilly. She asks why she always has to be the one who needs the bathroom. It’s because she always does.

They plan to meet when she’s done and go to the Merry-Go-Round. She gives him a big hug. He is an excellent big brother.

**Craig:** OK, John, what did you think of Plunder Cove? This is a pilot for a TV series.

**John:** So this is one of the most interesting Three Page Challenges I think I’ve encountered in this whole thing, because some of the writing in this was actually really nicely done and really thoughtful and the nature of the relationship between the brother and sister was interesting. The visual world of it was interesting. And yet these writers, it feels like they have not seen any other screenplays. Like they’re coming in from just some completely other universe of writing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because they just didn’t seem to have any sense of the standard ways that things are formatted. So maybe we’ll talk about the relationships first and then we’ll go into like OK this is how things actually need to look on the page, because the actual – some of the writing was good and would have been so much stronger with proper formatting.

So, I want to talk about our expectations of these two characters and what’s working and what could work better. What I liked about, so Elliot, age 17, and his nine-year-old sister, Lilly Marker, exit sedan. “ELLIOT, solid and tall, is a little too serious for his age. LILLY is high-energy, no patience, wild hair and untied shoes.” Great. Those are good descriptions of those people. Like I get what those people are. I get what the dynamic is. With that description I’m eager to see what is actually happening.

Then what’s actually happening, they’re sneaking into the park. He uses a hockey stick to pull open the chain link fence. Cool. I got it. I get all this stuff. I get a little sense that the home life is messed up. The mom is always in a box of wine. That the brother is a little annoyed by the little sister, but also very protective of the little sister. I basically got and believed their relationship in these three pages which is an accomplishment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I liked the wardrobe, hair, and makeup of the character introductions. I mean, look, the – and I’ll ignore the formatting, because truthfully I was thrilled. To be honest with you, thrilled to see something that people had typed that had absolutely no concern whatsoever for normal formatting. Because I just thought, oh good, finally a test of this thing I keep saying which is it doesn’t matter. Well, it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter to me. I’m sure that for other people they might look at this and go, nah, these people don’t know what they’re doing. But for me, they were an enjoyable three pages, so I stopped caring about that other stuff because in the end it doesn’t really matter.

I mean, if they could keep consistent within their own mad system that would be great. So, for instance, “park guy” is a character and he’s not capitalized, but everybody else is capitalized. So there are things like that. But by and large, you know, I got – here’s the truth, after the second page I stopped caring about that stuff and I was just inside of the scene.

So, let me talk about how that works, Paul and Erin. Pretty well. I think, relationship wise, again going back to the let’s not give away stuff that we don’t have to give away, they do this all the time. Right? We have an understanding that this is not the first time they’ve done this. Correct?

**John:** That is correct.

**Craig:** Lilly is sort of talking like she’s never done this before. That a lot of these things are new. “The biggest part of staying safe is just keeping your eyes open” is what he’s saying to her. Why is he saying this to her now after they’ve done this a bunch of times? You know? And then why is she asking what’s the other part, and “How come we never use the main gate?” That was the line that implied that they do this a lot.

**John:** Yeah. And so that exchange actually worked pretty well for me. I would cut out Lilly’s talk back line at the end. So, “How come we never use the main gate?” “We’ve got a special family pass.” He uses the hockey stick to pry it open. I didn’t need her line that says, “Our family pass looks a lot like a hockey stick.”

**Craig:** Precisely. Because you’ve seen the hockey stick many, many, many, many times. And then when she says, “Why do you always say I need to use the bathroom?” that makes sense, right?

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Frankly, the first exchange, too, “Watch your step. The biggest part of staying safe…What’s the other part? Dumb luck.” I’d cut that, too. I would just have him pull out the hockey stick and she’s like, “Can’t we – how come we never use the main gate?” “We’ve got a special family pass.” Then I get that.

She’s a little precocious for nine and we’ve seen that character many, many, many, many, many times. But, you know, it’s not the worst of it. And I liked their whole chitchat about the carousel and demoiselle and all that stuff. It felt nice.

I mean, look, there’s absolutely nothing in this teaser that qualifies as a teaser.

**John:** No. This isn’t a teaser for a TV show at all.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s kind of a scene. Here’s what we should say about a teaser. A teaser sets up a question. Sets up a mystery. Sets up this is the start of a journey and it was just the end of three pages. It wasn’t anything.

**Craig:** Yeah. For this to be a teaser you do this scene and then at the end of the scene you realize they’re ghosts. That’s a teaser. There’s nothing here that goes, whoa, it’s just a lovely, nice little moment and then off they go. It feels like the first scene of an independent film, not a teaser to start you off and make you gripped by a television show.

So, look, in terms of formatting and stuff, honestly Paul and Erin, here’s the truth. You guys write well enough that you probably should give yourself the advantage of writing things in the “normal” format. And you can do that for free. You can do that for free using, well, Highland, there’s a free version of Highland but that’s only–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** OK. So there’s free Highland. WriterDuet. There’s a free version of that. Just start there. At least you’ll get a sense of how the format works. But this was pretty well done.

**John:** Yeah. So a couple things, you know, using the write application will solve most of these problems, the weird way that dialogue was centered rather than blocked properly. If you’re going to do a pilot, that’s fine. Plunder Cove is the title of the series. You put the Episode on the title page. So, Episode One, Merry-Go-Round Broke Down. Teaser would generally be centered over the top of page one of the actual script. And then the application can take care of the rest of the stuff for you.

But here’s why I think it does matter. Here’s why standard formatting, or at least a semblance of standard formatting is if Megan hadn’t picked this as a Three Page Challenge and I was just like skimming through a bunch of them, I would have immediately passed over this because it didn’t look like a screenplay at all. It looked like some person who typed a play once and had never actually looked at it. And people are going to dismiss something that just looks so weird. And it’s not even consistent in how it is done. It’s not like they came up with some other system for how it was all going to be done. It just felt kind of random. And so you want everything to feel deliberate and you’ve made really good choices with words. Make really good choices in how you’re presenting those words so we actually will read your story.

**Craig:** I would have gravitated toward it. I’m just so bored of like, oh here it comes, INT…

You know, but that’s me. That’s me. I’m nuts.

**John:** All right. Let’s go to our third Three Page Challenge. It’s Savorless Salt by Mathieu Ghekiere. He’s from Belgium. I looked him up.

**Craig:** Oh, cool.

**John:** Megan, take it away.

**Megan:** Months are ripped from a calendar. Lucas, 10, sleeps. Hannah, 42, looks over a shelf of canned food with homemade labels. She selects a can and as she prepares a meal she’s careful to wipe down the containers. Jeff, 43, rides a stationary bike furiously, earning credits. Dylan, 5, wakes Lucas with excitement. It’s Christmas. Lucas looks at his wall covered in tick marks. He wipes them away with his sleeve.

Over their modest feast, Lucas challenges his mother’s assertion that it is Christmas. It’s been 412 days since last Christmas. Surprised that he’s been counting the days, she counters with an explanation that time is relative and leaves the table in a huff. Jeff encourages Lucas to keep counting and stay curious.

**John:** And we’re back. Craig, talk me through your experience with Savorless Salt.

**Craig:** What a strange and interesting title. Well I knew that Mathieu was not a native English speaker pretty quickly in. There’s something very lovely – in a lovely way it’s very backwards, the way that German is often backwards. Where he says, “Every month ends in the trash until December.” He’s talking about a calendar on a wall. “With a black marker every day before December 24th gets crossed.” Meaning every day before December 24th gets crossed off with a black marker. So it took me like three times on that sentence, but I was like, OK, I get it. And this is kind of actually awesome. I love the crazy syntax.

So generally speaking I thought this was pretty fantastic. I was gripped by the description. And I could see the space I was in. I understood, even if it said INT. BUNKER I understood that it was definitely bunker-y. That there was no need for me in the audience as it were to see the word bunker. I felt the bunkerness. I really loved that when we met Hannah she’s doing this interesting kind of ritualistic preparation of canned food. And then we get to Jeff who we, I guess are going to assume is her husband, and he’s biking. And you just infer that he’s generating energy and that the energy is measured in credits. So they have these obligations. And she throws powered bleach in the pot before putting in the vegetables. Lovely little details. I’m fascinated by what’s going on here. Fascinated.

Then I meet the brothers. I don’t know how old Lucas is. I know that his little brother Dylan is five. I’d love to know–

**John:** Lucas is 10.

**Craig:** Oh, where is that?

**John:** At the start there’s a weird scene that is underwritten. So, “INT. BEDROOM KIDS,” again.

**Craig:** Oh, there it is. Yeah.

**John:** “LUCAS, 10 years old, is sleeping”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But that was a situation where like we had no framing around that at all, so Bedroom Kids is reversed but also I don’t – what does that look like? That was an opportunity to show how this space is different than our expectations of what a bunker space should be, or the degree to which it matches those expectations.

**Craig:** Yeah, probably, Mathieu what you’d want to do is just cut that out. You can see the calendar on a concrete wall if you want. And then if you want to give us little glimpses of the space without drawing attention to people, and then go with Hannah, go with Jeff on the bike, back to Hannah, and then if you want to do the kids again. So just help us out there because I couldn’t remember from that little bloop. It didn’t even register in my brain.

So, his brother jumps on him because it’s Christmas. And in a very small bathroom, “Jeff washes himself with powder and the tiniest amount of water.” Another great little – I feel like I’m learning how whatever post-Apocalyptic nightmare these people live in, or if it’s not, regardless, I’m learning about bunker life. It’s kind of cool.

And then there’s this conversation that happens and Lucas is complaining a little bit that even though it’s Christmas the last Christmas happened 412 days ago. And this disturbs Hannah for some reason. I love the little mystery of this. Why is she upset that he’s been counting the days? She doesn’t like that, but Jeff does like that. Jeff, who is the dad-ish, kind of is pleased about this. And Hannah kind of loses her appetite. She’s having this emotional response to what seemingly is this just happy little family conversation. And smashes her elbows on the table. I’m pretty sure we want hands there. It’s very hard to smash your elbows on the table. Marches off and Jeff basically says to Lucas, you know, promise me you won’t stop counting.

Well, what I love here is I know so much. In three pages I know these people live in a bunker. I know roughly how bunker life works. I know that there’s something really creepy going on with Hannah. I know that the amount of days that they’ve been done there is at issue and that lies have been told. And I know that Jeff likes it and wants his kid to keep doing that because there’s conflict between him and Hannah. To me, that’s great.

So, you know, I say great job Mathieu. I really enjoyed these three pages.

**John:** Yeah. I was confused in the wrong way about Hannah. So I did up underlining on page three, “Her appetite is gone.” It’s like, well why I write. Because I didn’t see enough stuff there to give me a clue whether I was supposed to know that or not know that. And so, again, it’s being aware of what the reader is going to infer or not infer. I felt like Mathieu suspected I was a little more caught up than I actually was at that moment. So, that moment didn’t quite work for me. But I did like that you’re establishing these characters with a conflict already there.

It wasn’t spending a lot of time like everything is happy and now everything is fraught. This is a family that’s already in crisis even within this bunker context which is good. And that the nature of counting the days is important. I think the problem was, as a reader, I couldn’t imagine any scenario for why Hannah was acting the way she was. And so that left me a little bit frustrated.

**Craig:** Right. And I get that. I stopped a little bit when – when she lost her appetite I was a little confused by why it happened in that moment and not a little earlier. I think maybe when he makes the counting thing, maybe that’s when she puts her fork down. The losing your appetite also is a little funky one just because Mathieu makes a big deal about how this is a feast and yet it’s not a lot of food, which makes me think that they’re on rations and are hungry a lot. So, but there’s something also a bit scary about Hannah, which I like. The unpredictable emotionality was putting me on edge, and I like that.

**John:** Yeah. So in our previous episode we talked about point of view and I think one of the things, especially this last scene, could benefit from is a little bit more clear point of view. Because we established all of these characters, but whose point of view are we seeing this dinner scene through? Is it from Hannah’s point of view? Is it from Jeff’s? Is it from one of the boys? And I think making that choice will inform how the scene plays and how we as an audience are reading this moment.

If we’re supposed to be seeing this from Hannah’s point of view, that’s frustrating because we don’t understand Hannah’s point of view. If we’re seeing it from Jeff’s point of view, which seems a little bit more likely, that feels a little bit more grounded. And the boys’ point of view could be equally valid. But I think we need to give the boys a little bit more screen time and weight beforehand and see everything kind of from their POV, which might mean cutting out the Jeff in the shower and stuff like that. Just so we’re really seeing it from the boys’ point of view.

**Craig:** That’s fair. I think there’s a little bit of confusion in there about who we’re with. But I was impressed by the amount of information that I got without being smacked in the face with it. So, it was interesting.

**John:** Let’s talk about Mathieu’s English. Because his English is pretty good, but there’s things that he messes up that you’re going to mess up as a non-native speaker.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so if he’s really writing this in English rather than French or another language, I think it would serve him well to have a native speaker just do a quick run through and just flip some of the words around so it reads a little bit better as standard English. Because sometimes we stop and we trip on things like, wait, what did he actually mean there? And if it was smooth and effortless it would serve him better.

**Craig:** No question. I mean I can go through this and practically every single paragraph there is some kind of mistake in English and they are somewhat subtle. We generally call – it’s canned food. We don’t refer to them as metal food cans. We don’t say big pearls of sweat. We would say big beads or droplets of sweat. He’s eyes instead of his eyes. There’s a lot of things like this. She wipes the plastic with a paper cloth. I think in English we would say paper towel.

So there’s all these little idiomatic things. And, by the way, this is something that I had to do, even though I was writing in English for English people, for Chernobyl because it’s essentially a British production and actors and crew were sort of used to reading a certain thing. We just decided we’re just going to go with British spellings and we were going to go with British words to not confuse people. So, for instance, no more flash lights but they have–

**John:** Torches. Yep.

**Craig:** So Jane Featherstone read through the whole script and sort of went, no, no, yes, yes, change that. Colour. You know. It was all – and it doesn’t change anything, Mathieu. I mean, that’s the point, is that it’s still your writing, you’re just making it what you actually intended it to be.

**John:** Yep. All right, thank you again to our three brave entrants to the Three Page Challenge. I guess it was actually four because there was one writing team.

If you would like to read these pages, they’re at johnaugust.com. Just look for this episode and you can find the PDFs to download. Or if you want to submit your own it’s johnaugust.com/threepage.

It has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Things are these books which you’ve seen in a bookstore, I assure you, if you live in the United States. They’re these sepia toned books that are about local history. So, the first one of these I read was on Larchmont which is the little shopping street in my neighborhood by Patricia Lombard. It was a great history of this weird little shopping street in Los Angeles. But doing research for this new project I’ve been pulling up a lot of LA history. And some of these books are fantastic. Another one I’d recommend is African-Americans in Los Angeles by Karin L. Stanford.

So these books, there’s a company that makes them called Images of America. There’s really a very set template. There’s a ton of photos. Some are really well written, some are not well written. But they’re so fascinating in their very, very, very local history of a place that I’d really encourage you to check them out for wherever you are living right now or wherever you grew up. But if you need to do research on a place, historical research on a place, they are great because they just have a ton of photos of a place that, yes, you could probably find online but you couldn’t find in context. So, I’m going to recommend these Images of America books.

**Craig:** I picked up one of those for La Cañada, the town where I live in. You know, La Cañada in many ways is an incredibly boring little town. That’s kind of why we like it. But when you read the history of La Cañada you realize it’s always been a boring a little town.

**John:** Nothing’s changed.

**Craig:** No. My One Cool Thing is the aforementioned Lindsay Doran Ted Talk. I apologize if it’s been my One Cool Thing before but I don’t care. It’s that good. It’s an evergreen. You should absolutely listen to this. It’s brilliant. It’s not long. It’s 18 minutes and 25 seconds. And in that 18 minutes and 25 seconds Lindsay Doran, who is a brilliant, brilliant producer, legendary producer, manages to convey precisely what it is about movies and relationships that draw us in. And it is such a refreshing antidote to a lot of the garbage advice that I think is handed out, particularly about endings to people, in which endings become loud, stakes-building crescendos of explosions and nonsense cacophony. And miss out on what an ending really is.

And she does this wonderful job of explaining to you through movies you’ve already seen whose endings you may have forgotten what the endings are really about. So Lindsay Doran Ted Talk. Link in the show notes.

**John:** Fantastic. So that’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Michael O’Konis. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answer on the show.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. That’s a good place to go for little small questions about things.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there you can leave us a comment. That helps people find the show. But you can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

We have now seven seasons of Scriptnotes available to download. If you go to store.johnaugust.com you can download them as big files that have all the mp3s. All the related materials. And the bonus episodes. So they are $5 per season if you want to go back through those.

We also have Scriptnotes.net which is $2 a month and lets you load and download any of those episodes of the first 359 that we’ve done, plus the bonus episodes.

So, Craig, thank you again for a fun show about relationships.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. My relationship with you is better than ever.

**John:** Better than ever. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Talk to you soon. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Arlo Finch covers](http://johnaugust.com/2018/youd-hardly-recognize-arlo-finch-overseas) look different around the world. You can catch John at the San Diego Festival of Books on August 25, at the Orange Public Library Comic-Con on September 22, at the Texas Book Festival on October 25th, or in Frankfurt, Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen in early October.
* The [Austin Film Festival](https://austinfilmfestival.com) is also coming up on October 25th.
* In a musical, the relationship can be with the audience, like in Shrek: The Musical’s [“Big Bright Beautiful World”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sqopU4V60w) or Fiddler on the Roof’s [“If I Were a Rich Man”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_XeHLrkwTY) — as opposed to [the movie version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBHZFYpQ6nc).
* [Three pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/CONVENIENCE.pdf) by Jonathan Brown
* [Three pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/PLUNDER_COVE.pdf) by Paul Acampora & Erin Dionne
* [Three pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SAVORLESS_SALT.pdf) by Mathieu Ghekiere
* You can submit for the three page challenge [here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage).
* [Images of America Book Series](https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/series/images-of-america-books?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5Izfyqis3AIVjeNkCh1gSANLEAAYASAAEgLEB_D_BwE&ef_id=W1EenwAABGOU1CD9:20180719232831:s)
* [Larchmont](https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9781467134118) by Patricia Lombard
* [African-Americans in Los Angeles](https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/Products/9780738580944) by Karin L. Stanford
* Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk – [Saving the World vs. Kissing the Girl](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=752INSLlyf0)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Michael O’Konis ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_360.mp3).